


the other side of want

by prettydizzeed



Category: Halloween Movies - All Media Types, Halloweentown (1998)
Genre: Autumn, Coming of Age, Falling In Love, Fix-It, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, Halloween, Healing, M/M, Magic, Self-Acceptance, University, Witches, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:35:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 22,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26832277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettydizzeed/pseuds/prettydizzeed
Summary: He remembers his grandma saying magic is very simple: all you have to do is want something and let yourself have it. But Dylan’s never been any good with that—the magic and the wanting both.***Return to Halloweentown, except there are no wannabe overlords or queen bees using mind-control, there’s just Halloweentown and its magical university adjusting to students with no magic—and struggling to find their place amid it all, Ethan, who has not suddenly learned to color-coordinate since high school, and Dylan, who’s hoping that for once he can just enjoy his Halloween.
Relationships: Dylan Piper & Marnie Piper, Ethan Dalloway/Dylan Piper, Marnie Piper/Aneesa
Comments: 58
Kudos: 45





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I’m kind of picking and choosing my canon here since a lot of the source material is contradictory; I’m not sure how much of this will actually show up in the fic, but for the purposes of my worldbuilding, Halloweentown has a mayor like in the first film rather than a council like in the third, although Edgar Dalloway still tried to sabotage the exchange program. 
> 
> None of the plot from the fourth film is canon for this fic; I basically kept the existence and faculty (who aren’t evil here, I’m just bad at coming up with names so let’s go with the same ones lol) of Witch U while adjusting its background—this is the first year allowing students who can’t practice magic due to Marnie opening the portal permanently, but magic isn’t forbidden at the school (more on that within the fic later) and Witch U wasn’t formerly Cromwell Castle because I’m throwing out the whole former overlord thing and sticking to the basic premise of the first film’s lore.
> 
> I think that about covers it. Let me know if you have any questions lol, and I hope you enjoy!

I simply want and what dear god

is on the other side of want? I want that too.

–Michael Lee, “Rows,” _The Only Worlds We Know_

Dylan resolutely does not think of the MIT acceptance letter in his bedroom desk drawer as he steps through the portal to Halloweentown, lugging both his and Marnie’s bags—which, honestly, she already shrunk both of their stuff down enough to fit in one bag each, would it have killed her to shrink the bags themselves? He doesn’t think of it when he crosses the town square for the first time in almost five years, either, or in the backseat of Benny’s taxi on the ride to the campus. As they walk across the Witch University quad for the first time, though, he can’t keep it out of his mind, especially when Marnie makes a pointed remark about him not being a student here. If she’s this pissed about him chaperoning her move-in process, she’s really going to lose it when she finds out he’s enrolled here.

God. He’s enrolled here. 

Maybe he should’ve told her about the bargain he and Mom struck, but it honestly would’ve been worse if she’d just let him go ahead with ruining the next four years of his life for her without protest, so. Better for her to learn once there’s nothing that can be done about it, and he’ll do his best to not expect a thank you. 

He gets a moment’s blissful reprieve from his self-pity and anxiety when he spots a familiar head of over-gelled blonde hair. “Hey, look, it’s Ethan,” he says to Marnie, and then, louder, “Hey, Ethan!”

Ethan, from where he’s sitting alone on a low stone wall, book open on his lap, looks up and waves. Dylan waves back. Marnie sighs.

“Aren’t you late for something? Like your own life?” 

And yeah, he is, or he will be—four whole years late. Maybe he can graduate college early like he did with high school. He just sighs and keeps walking, Marnie’s bag bumping against his shins, and if his atypical lack of retort to their constant ribbing surprises her, she doesn’t let it show. 

Eventually, Marnie takes pity on him and levitates their bags the rest of the way to her dorm room, where she immediately plops onto the floor while a whirlwind of clothes and accessories sort themselves around her mid-air. She blinks up at him. “Oh, sorry, are you waiting on a hug goodbye? I figured we handled all of that back at the house. Or are you supposed to supervise my unpacking, too?” 

Dylan swallows. No time like the present. “Uh, actually, I’m just trying to figure out how to get to my room from here.”

Marnie gapes. “Your _what?_ No, no way.”

“Yeah way,” he sighs, crossing his arms. “It was the only way Mom would agree to let you come. You’re looking at an official student of Witch University’s Magical Technology major.” He does a weak jazz hands— _Surprise!_ Marnie, for her part, does an impressive job of multitasking, pouting while jumping up to pace angrily. Dylan decides to make his exit when she gets to the point of talking to herself, loudly debating the merits of calling Mom on the witch’s glass to yell at her versus freezing her out entirely. That’s her and mom’s problem to deal with; he just hopes he doesn’t have to room with an ogre. 

Turns out, he doesn’t have to room with anyone; room 314, when he finds it, is a narrow single, with enough space for a twin bed, a small wardrobe, a desk, and a bookshelf, all in the same deep mahogany of all the wood in the castle. Still, it’s a cut above the standard-issue furniture in any college in the mortal world; the headboard has intricate carvings of leaves, along with math formulas, the golden spiral, and Fibonacci’s sequence, and the desk has a multitude of locking drawers, with a key and what looks suspiciously like an indentation to hold an inkwell on its surface. He adds the key to his keyring, between the heavy iron one to his dorm room and the reassuringly normal, lightweight one to their house back home. 

He’s hit with an overwhelming wave of homesickness and closes his eyes for a moment, key grasped tight in his palm. Then he opens his eyes, pockets the key ring, and sets to figuring out how to unshrink all his stuff. 

It takes the better part of the morning, but finally Dylan manages to successfully unshrink everything without staining, shapeshifting, or otherwise mangling it, and gets his bed made, his books put on the shelf in alphabetical order by author, his warm-autumn clothes hung in the top of the wardrobe and his cold-autumn clothes folded in the bottom of it (one of the perks of it always being one season in Halloweentown: less packing necessary), and his Star Trek and constellation posters hung up by the bed. He wonders if the stars are the same in Halloweentown. He’s never been here long enough to learn. 

Well, he’s got plenty of time now, and “to learn” is sort of the whole reason he’s here. The rest of the whole reason being to keep his danger magnet of an older sister out of life-threatening trouble, of the typical college variety and otherwise.

A wrinkled, cream-colored scroll of parchment materializes on his desk just then, interrupting his thoughts, and he takes a few minutes to have a quiet and contained existential freak-out over what the fuck he’s gotten himself into. He’s gone off to college a year earlier than he’d figured he would for two-thirds of his time in high school, to a place he’s only spent a handful of days in that also happens to be in another dimension, at a school historically specializing in the one thing about himself he’s spent his whole adolescence trying to avoid. He has no script for this, no context built up from TV romcoms or parents’ stories—he isn’t even sure if his mom went to Witch U, to be honest, although she had to have, right? But she certainly hasn’t mentioned anything about it, just like she still avoids talking about anything magical, and even though he’s read the student handbook cover to cover, it didn’t include anything about how to adjust to interdimensional culture shock. 

There’s a counseling center, he remembers vaguely, in one of the buildings adjacent to the castle; he flips to the page in the handbook and writes down their headphone number on a reassuringly normal sticky note and resolves to call tomorrow. He isn’t sure how much help they’ll be, likely expecting all of their residents to be at least used to Halloweentown even if they’re feeling isolated as some of Witch U’s first non-witches, but it’s worth a shot. Even though she hasn’t said it, he knows his mom is worried about him, too. 

That settled, he takes a deep breath and breaks the deep blue wax seal on the scroll, unrolling it. _Welcome to Witch University!_ it reads in comfortingly messy handwriting. _I’m your resident assistant, Cypress (pronouns: ve/ver/vers). Please stop by my room, West Wing 322, today at your earliest convenience. I look forward to meeting you!_

At least the concept of an RA is something he’s familiar with, even if ve can make notes appear in his room instead of making a group chat. Dylan leaves for room 322. 

When he knocks on the door, a deep, cheery voice calls, “Be right with you!” Moments later, a short, smiling person opens the door with a flourish. Ve has light green skin that’s rough and shimmery, and wild, dark green hair with leaves and flowers braided into it. Ver shoulders are broad, and ve is wearing worn denim overalls, a dozen or so beaded bracelets that clack when ve moves, and warm brown nail polish. Dylan lets out a breath; he might actually be comfortable asking ver a question or two. 

“Hey,” he says, “I’m Dylan, I’m on your hall. Uh, room 314.” 

“Dylan Piper!” ve says, ver voice close to booming but managing to sound only bright. “Lovely to meet you! Please, come in, sit down—this’ll only be a minute, I promise, I’m sure your move-in day is plenty hectic as-is.” 

Dylan doesn’t mention that he’s already unpacked and isn’t really sure how he’s going to keep his mind busy for the next seven or so hours until convocation. He steps into Cypress’s room and sits in one of the three red, velvety chairs clustered around a fireplace. There’s a tea service on a small side table between them, a detailed forest pattern on the china. When Dylan looks at it more closely, he realizes the leaves are rustling, birds flitting from branch to branch. 

“Lovely, isn’t it?” Cypress asks. “It’s my home.” Ver smile is wistful. “I’m a dryad, one of the three in this year’s incoming class. It’s nice to have something with me that reminds me of there.” 

“Yeah, the culture shock is… a lot,” Dylan finds himself saying without thinking. God, day one and he’s already opening up to strangers? Who is he, Marnie?

Cypress just nods, though, making a rumbly humming sound. “Absolutely. I’m the only dryad RA—the others are on this hall, as well; the counseling center advised the Chancellor and her cabinet to try to give new species a support system to ease the transition—so when I moved in a month ago for training, it was certainly overwhelming.” Dylan nods. God, and he though he had it rough. At least none of the witches and warlocks stare at him as they undoubtedly do Cypress; Marnie might not be able to avoid the same, well-known as she is as the Cromwell heir, but no one knows Dylan. He’s never thought that maybe that could be a good thing. 

“Anyway,” Cypress continues, “I have your opening day information—map with your classrooms highlighted, upcoming events you might be interested in, that sort of thing—and a brief spiel of hall policies I've got to go through with each resident.” Ve hands him a thick scroll of bright orange paper. Yay, school spirit. “Quiet hours are from ten to eight on weekdays and midnight to ten on weekends, so don’t blare any loud music or that sort of thing during those time frames. The carriage to Halloweentown runs every three hours from noon to midnight Friday through Sunday; if you need to go to town during the week and don’t have a broom or your own alternate means of transportation, you can call the headphone number for Benny’s cab service, which is in one of the sections of the scroll I gave you. There’s no strict visitation policy for other students, just don’t disturb the other people on the hall, but any visitors from the mortal world need to fill out the visitation form in the Chancellor’s office as well as a check-in and check-out form with me, and they can’t stay longer than forty-eight consecutive hours.”

“I don’t think I want my mom here for two whole days in a row,” Dylan says, and Cypress laughs, deep and warm. 

“The last bit of housekeeping I’ve got is to let me know if you see any outdated signage around the castle. Restrooms, for example, used to be divided into Witches, Warlocks, and Wizards, but since other species aren’t magic users and don’t fit into any of those categories, not to mention have our own concepts of gender outside of even magic users’ more inclusive phrasing, all the previously gendered spaces on campus are fully gender-inclusive, aside from the Witches’ Center, which will be offering programming for marginalized genders of all species. Some of the signage might’ve gotten missed during the first go-round, though, so just jot a note on the scroll on my door if you see anything and I’ll let the Chancellor’s office know.” 

“Sounds good,” Dylan says, nodding. 

“Do you have any questions?” ve asks. 

“Uh, so I saw in the handbook that there’s a Students for the Inclusion of Mortals organization—do you, uh, know if that includes half-mortals?” 

“That group is new,” Cypress says, “but almost all of the special interest and advocacy clubs are open to allies, so I’m sure mixed-species students will be welcome, too. They’ll probably be at the Organization Faire on the quad this afternoon, so you could ask there.” 

“Okay, cool, will do,” Dylan says, smiling tightly. He can’t help feeling exposed, no matter how nice Cypress has been about everything. “Thanks.”

“Of course,” ve says. “Let me know if you need anything. Otherwise, I’ll be checking in at the end of your first week and then at least once a quarter after that. It was nice to meet you, Dylan!”

“You, too,” he says, and takes his absurdly thick scroll back to his room, where he promptly takes a stress nap on top of his comforter for the next hour and a half. 

When Dylan wakes up, it’s one o’clock and he’s in desperate need of locating both the nearest restroom and the dining hall. The former is thankfully only a couple of doors over from his room, relatively modern plumbing magicked into functioning with its ornate stone and wood surroundings. He’s briefly horrified at the thought that there might not be any showers, just the clawfoot porcelain bathtubs separated by thick velvet curtains, but that’s a problem for tonight. He washes his hands with the pumpkin spice-scented soap and only gets lost twice before emerging from a wide hallway into the dining hall, which is striking a mismatched balance between its grand medieval origins and a typical college cafeteria. For the first time in Halloweentown, he feels almost at home. 

The food offerings are… eclectic, to say the least, and far punnier than they have any right to be, but he manages to cobble together a tray of items that don’t appear to contain any bugs, eyeballs, or poisonous leaves. The Witch’s Brew Stew, at least, seems ironically safe. Sort of like a chilli. His victory in acquiring edible means of sustenance is short-lived, however, as he immediately encounters a far worse battle, the stuff of teen drama nightmares: deciding where to sit. 

He sees Marnie out the corner of his eye, sitting with a pretty South Asian girl—or, there isn’t a Halloweentown version of South Asia, he’s pretty sure, so maybe not, come to think of it—with a long ponytail of dark, smooth hair. Marnie either hasn’t seen him or is resolutely ignoring him, and he doesn’t really want to find out which, so he keeps looking. All-warlock table of obvious jocks—pass. Three incredibly fashionable, gorgeous in a way that they look like they could kill you if you look at them too long, witches glaring invisible daggers (he hopes not literally) at anyone who dares to walk too close—not on his life. Ethan Dalloway, by himself at a table in the back corner—hey, that one just might work. Dylan weaves his way in Ethan’s direction, which gets easier the closer he gets; no one is at any of the tables next to Ethan’s, either. 

“Hey,” Dylan says when he gets close enough.

Ethan looks up, startled, and smiles when he sees who it is. “Dylan, hey! Are you helping Marnie move in?” 

Dylan decides not to be offended by that. If he looks at it right, he could even see it as a compliment. “Actually, I go here.” 

“Wait, seriously? Shit, sorry, I didn’t mean—I just figured you’d go to a school in the mortal world. And aren’t you a year younger than me and Marnie?”

“Skipped a grade,” Dylan says first, because that’s the easy part to explain. “And our mom wouldn’t let Marnie go to college in another dimension by herself, so here I am.” He gives half-hearted jazz hands for what he realizes in horror is the second time today. 

“Seriously?” Ethan asks, and Dylan nods, mouth full of stew. “Damn. That’s really selfless, dude.” 

Dylan swallows and shrugs. “Yeah, well. Selfless, sidekick, same thing.” 

Ethan shakes his head. “Seriously, you did a really generous thing. I hope Marnie realizes that soon.” 

“Thanks,” Dylan says, unable to keep from smirking a little at how Ethan knew without asking that Marnie’s pitching a fit about the whole thing. “You know, I remember you as being way more cynical in high school.” He doesn’t mention what else he remembers, which is how Ethan left halfway through the fall semester after the clusterfuck of a Halloween carnival that involved humans finding out the exchange students from “Canada” were actually monsters, a literal angry mob and various attempted hate crimes (yeah, he really needs to call the counseling center), and his sister somehow managing to come out the other end not with not only a larger hero complex but also a new boyfriend. 

(She and Cody had a series of tearful phone calls over the last month before ultimately deciding that across dimensions was too long of a distance to try to make it work. Dylan figures that’s probably for the best, but he still took Marnie on a late-night ice cream run when she told him. It’s his duty as her brother and the only Piper sibling with a driver’s license for an actual car, not a cleaning implement.) 

“Yeah, well, it was high school,” Ethan is saying. “And, you know, the whole ‘abusive dad using me as a means to enact his bigotry and rampant nationalism’ thing didn’t exactly help matters.”

“Fair enough,” Dylan says, which, hey, at least that’s out in the open now.

“Listen,” Ethan says, “I’m really sorry about everything—”

Dylan cuts him off. “Dude, you were seventeen. As someone who is currently seventeen, if my mom wanted to take over the world, I’d probably help her, too.”

Ethan, surprisingly, laughs. “I didn’t think anyone would get hurt,” he says, immediately serious again. “Which I know seems so fucking naïve—”

“Please stop making me interrupt you,” Dylan says, and Ethan smiles again, which is the best thing that’s happened to him all day. “Again: seventeen. Our prefrontal cortices are so far from being developed at that point, it’s a miracle we don’t all get manipulated into inadvertently participating in evil schemes. Literally, even by the time you graduate here, your brain _still_ won’t be done growing—” he realizes Marnie definitely would’ve made a sarcastic comment about him rambling by now and closes his mouth, embarrassingly confused to realize Ethan still has a small smile dancing across his mouth. 

“Are you majoring in some sort of neuroscience, then?” he asks. “There’s a comparative biology degree, right?”

“No—I mean, there might be, but I’m majoring in Magical Technology. It’s no computer science, but it does sound kind of cool, even if I’m half-expecting the textbooks to explain on page one that there’s actually no internal logic to any of this.” 

Ethan laughs. “Sounds interesting.”

“Uh, what about you?” Dylan asks, because that seems like the thing to do. They’re both managing to get through their food at a rapid rate despite the conversation; soon, he won’t be able to stall by taking large bites of sourdough. 

“Herbology, actually,” Ethan says, leaning back slightly and flexing his fingers against the edge of the table. “I worked for your grandma over the summer, helping her collect her gnarlier potion ingredients. Kind of developed a knack for it, or at least an interest.”

“That’s really cool,” Dylan says, and means it. He remembers various late night conversations over his AP Bio textbook during the two and a half months while Ethan and the other students from Halloweentown were staying with them last year, photosynthesis and transpiration and capillary action, how fascinated Ethan was by all of it. How carefully he listened to everything Dylan told him, how insightful his questions were. How much Dylan missed him when he had to go back to reviewing his notes to an empty wall after Ethan left. 

“Yeah, I, uh,” Ethan says, and seems to decide to go ahead and say whatever he’s thinking, “I want to do something to help people, you know?” 

“That makes sense,” Dylan says, and it really does, enough that it makes something in his chest tight. He distracts himself by looking at Ethan’s orange and black striped bowtie, the contrast of which even Dylan can recognize is frankly garish against his bright red button-down. “Too bad the new and improved moral system didn’t come with a matching update for your fashion sense,” he says, and worries he’s gone too far for the half-second it takes before Ethan is desperately grabbing at his ridiculously expensive-looking cloth napkin as he promptly snorts cider out his nose. He laughs long and hard, and when he finally catches his breath, elbows Dylan lightly in the side.

“Fuck you,” he says, “That’s rich coming from the guy in a sweatervest.”

“Which at least matches my pants,” Dylan retorts. “And are you forgetting you wore a _bright red beret_ to your first day of mortal high school?”

“I was getting into character!” Ethan protests, but he’s laughing again. 

And even as Dylan says, “As what, a French caricature of an American tourist?” he thinks yeah, if this maybe-renewed friendship doesn’t immediately crash and burn, he can forgive Marnie for sort of unintentionally dragging him to a different dimension for the remainder of his teens and beginning of his twenties. Eventually.

They split up to go back to their dorms—Ethan is living on the fourth floor of the Southeast Wing, and his RA, a haughty witch named Nova, doesn’t sound nearly as cool as Cypress—but end up running into each other mostly by accident on the quad for the Organization Faire. Mostly, because Dylan has maybe been scanning for gravity-defying blonde bangs out the corner of his eye since he walked outside. 

Witch U’s thirty or so student organizations each have a stall set up on the quad, scattered in what could generously be called a spiral but more likely has no discernible pattern. The sturdy wooden tables each support a wooden frame, draped over which are various colorful, billowing fabrics embroidered with the organization’s name. Ethan is coming from the Theatre Troupe stall, which has a frightening number of tassels, dropping a scroll into his red and blue patchwork bag, which is bright enough to damage Dylan’s corneas, as he goes. 

“Hey,” Ethan says.

“Hey,” Dylan echoes.

They walk in silence for a bit, at which point Dylan stops to grab an informational scroll from the Students for the Inclusion of Mortals stall and, after a moment’s thought, write down his headphone number on their scroll of sign-ups. His mom would want him to get involved with _something,_ and he isn’t thrilled at the thought of sitting alone in his room all the time, anyway. 

To his surprise, Ethan writes his name down on the scroll, too. He must be really trying to put his money where his mouth is when it comes to the whole “I’m renouncing my father’s anti-mortal bigotry” thing. 

They meander aimlessly past the other stalls—the Vegetarian Club, where a smiling werewolf grills tofu grubs and a vampire explains to him the process of creating artificial blood; the Intramural Broom Racing League, which they walk slightly faster past in order to get by without the lithe warlocks behind the table trying to talk to them; the Cauldron Club, which makes Ethan’s eyes light up at the fourth-year witch’s explanation of their extracurricular potion-brewing projects—until Dylan sees a familiar face. 

“Hey, Cypress!” he calls, and the dryad turns from where ve is talking with a Black wizard with purple braids and long gold earrings to wave and beam at him. 

“Uh, this is Cypress,” he tells Ethan when they get closer to the table, “Ve’s my RA. Cypress, this is Ethan. He’s, uh, a friend from high school.”

“Nice to meet you!” ve says, and gestures to the wizard behind the stall. “I was just asking Andromeda about the Rainbow Coven.” 

Dylan’s internal question of whether rainbow has the same connotation in Halloweentown as it does in the mortal world is answered when he looks more closely at the drapes on the stall, which depict various numbers of witches, warlocks, and wizards in a variety of combinations holding hands with hearts over them. A little cheesy, but it’s cute, and it reminds him of the other benefit to being here: “There’s no such thing as homophobia in Halloweentown,” his mom had told him the day after he’d decided to follow Marnie to school so she could go to the college of her dreams. His mom’s face was tight with the combination of fear and nostalgia it always had on the rare occasions she mentioned her hometown, and she was perched stiffly on the edge of his bed, and neither of them acknowledged why she was telling him this, but she kept talking, and he hoped she knew he was grateful. “It’s… I mean, there are some people who are hateful, but it’s not a social phenomenon on the same scale. It’d be like…” She struggled to think of a comparison. “How some people don’t want their child to marry someone who’s in a certain career, I guess, not because of a class prejudice but just because they have a personal grudge. And don’t get me wrong, Halloweentown has plenty of issues with discrimination between species in certain areas, but on the basis of sexuality, not so much.”

And it could just be a trick of the light, or just something to do with them as an individual, but the wizard at the table looks lighter, free of a weight that’s been hunching his shoulders since age twelve. It’s something really beautiful to witness. 

“It’s good to meet you both,” Andromeda says, their voice rich and lilting and heavy with magic. “We’re planning to determine a name more inclusive of our new non-magic students, but unfortunately we weren’t able to meet to decide on something prior to the Faire.”

“Makes sense,” Dylan says, nodding, and takes a scroll and he/him pronoun button from the table. It’s a literal button; he holds it up to his backpack, and when Andromeda waves their hand, rainbow thread stitches it to the fabric. Ethan takes one, too, and writes his headphone number down on the parchment, which is—maybe he’s just an ally, right, but do you really need allies if everybody has equal civil rights? Dylan writes down his own number and knows he would read way too much into however Ethan is looking at him when he does if he could see Ethan’s face, so he keeps his eyes carefully averted as he sets down the pen. 

Cypress waves goodbye to them and continues chatting with Andromeda as they leave with promises to try to make it to the first meeting. 

“I should probably go get changed for convocation,” Ethan says after they finish their zig-zagging traversement of the quad, looking up at the clock tower that’s begun to chime. 

“Make sure not to let your tie match your shirt,” Dylan says, “I wouldn’t recognize you.”

“We can’t have that,” Ethan says, grinning, and Dylan firmly does not look back as they part ways. 

It’s a good thing they left when they did, because it takes him the better part of an hour to figure out how to put on the heavy traditional robes over his plain slacks and white button-down. They’re more of a burnt sienna than a candy corn orange, which is actually almost classy, and once he actually gets all of his body parts through all the right holes and runs a brush through his hair, he looks… kind of good. For a half-human who wouldn’t even be here if he didn’t love his sister more than is medically advisable, at least. 

Ethan’s assigned seat is several rows in front of him in the auditorium, which also doubles as the ballroom, because apparently even Halloweentown believes in things like alphabetical order. Even from back here, though, Dylan can spot his bowtie: it’s bright yellow and shimmery, and absolutely the worst color to ever attempt to pair with the formal robes, and horrifyingly honestly kind of cute. 

Dylan is maybe kind of extremely fucked.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yes i did spend way too long coming up with the main characters’ class schedules

“Good morning, all,” Dylan’s Introduction to Magical Theory professor says at nine o’clock sharp the next morning. They’re a tall, thin wizard with light brown skin, short silver hair, and round glasses, and overall, they give the impression of being the pinnacle of practicality: crisp button-down with a pocket protector, closed-toed shoes, no jewelry. Stereotypical STEM professor, other than the wearing all black and being nonbinary, Dylan thinks, and relaxes a bit. 

“I’m Professor Embreis,” they continue, “As denoted in your syllabus, I use they/them pronouns. I’m thrilled to be teaching this course at such a historic point in Witch University’s history. A few points on that topic: I’ve tried to adjust my syllabus to avoid assuming familiarity with using magic, but if you feel that you need any supplementary foundational material, please don’t hesitate to visit my office hours; those are listed on the scroll I just passed out. And the other is to please keep in mind that you signed Witch U’s updated code of conduct agreement stating you will not use magic to complete any assignments outside of specifically designated Witchcraft courses. This class does not fall into that category, so while we will be discussing how magic behaves and how it may be used in technological advancement, all assignments will be scanned for evidence of magic use, and any offenders will receive a zero. Are we clear?” Their tone is firm but pleasant, and they smile when the class nods.

“Excellent. Now, who can start us off by sharing the name of the first instrument considered a form of magical technology?” 

After a few moments of quiet and shuffling from the class, a nymph at the desk next to Dylan’s raises her hand. 

“Yes, Miss Hectra?” Professor Embreis asks, hands clasped behind their back and eyebrows raised expectantly. 

“The wand,” she says, and the professor nods. 

“Precisely. Now, I would be remiss in instructing on the development of magical technology without beginning with that piece of technology which first allowed magic users to _use_ magic, even though later developments have since made it all but obsolete…” 

Dylan is startled when the chime reaches them from the clock tower an hour later. Honestly, he’s never had to pay attention this intentionally in class before, but he knows so little about magic—about Halloweentown, period—that he’s had to furiously scribble notes all period to keep up with Professor Embreis’s lecture. He has at least four terms highlighted to look up later. 

As he packs his notebook into his bag, he glances up at movement beside him, and “Excuse me” is out of his mouth before he can stop it. The nymph from earlier turns, chair pivoting smoothly on nothing. 

“Yes?” 

“I just wanted to say, that is the coolest thing I have ever seen.” He wonders after a second if that might be rude, but by then she’s smiling, so it’s probably fine.

“Thank you,” she says, hand resting lightly on a lever—for sharp turns, maybe? 

“Is it—I just want to look up more later, I don’t want to, like, make you demonstrate essentially how a part of your body works—” great going, Dylan, that doesn’t sound awkward at all— “What is it called?”

“It’s a hoverchair,” she says, “one of the newer models. I can recommend you an article from a recent issue of _Witch’s Craft,_ if you want; they’ll probably have it in the library.” 

“That’d be amazing,” Dylan says, following her out the classroom when she taps the engraved panel beside the doorframe and the door magically opens. So that’s what that’s for. “Thank you.”

“No problem,” she says. “I’m majoring in Magic Tech because I want to work on assistive technology, so let me know if you want any other suggestions. I’m Elissa Hectra, by the way.”

“Dylan Piper,” he says, “Nice to meet you. Uh, are you by any chance headed to Overview of Magical Communication Methods?” 

She is, so they make their way through the castle together, Dylan frantically making mental notes about what’s evidently the magical world’s answer to the elevator, a stone platform with an intricate copper railing and hundreds of tiny sculpted wings that fly them smoothly three stories up. 

“It can technically go up stairs,” Elissa says, gesturing at her chair, “but it has a maximum clearance of about one hand above the ground, so it’s bumpier than trying to ride a manticore. And besides, it’s no excuse for them to not make things accessible.”

“Makes sense,” Dylan agrees. He notices that not all the carved wings on the flying section of floor are feathered; some look like they’d be leathery, like a bat’s. Or maybe a dragon’s?

The Overview of Magical Communication Methods lecture is less overwhelming than the previous class; he’s already familiar with headphones and witch’s glasses, and they spent long enough going over the syllabus that they don’t cover even those devices in much depth yet, much less start discussing any others. It’s kind of strange having the same professor for two classes in a row, which never happened in high school, although Dylan wouldn’t have expected it to be as startling as it is among the thousands of other things that are vastly outside of his lived experience.

Like the lunch special being deep-fried cave spider, for example.

Dylan skips out on that, as does Elissa, and opts instead for a bowl of bug-free Tropical Tombstones cereal and a hopefully unenchanted apple. He spots Ethan in the same corner table as last time and is making his way over when Elissa suddenly says, “I’ll see you in class on Wednesday. Have a good afternoon,” and floats over to an empty table with her sandwich.

Huh. That probably stings more than it should; he didn’t ever actually ask if she was going to eat with them, but. Still.

“That was weird,” Dylan says to Ethan, setting his food down, and Ethan shakes his head.

“Dude, for someone so brilliant, you can be really slow on the uptake.” Dylan blinks at him. “You’re kind of the only student who’s talking to me.”

“What?” Dylan asks, and Ethan raises an eyebrow, which he is immediately jealous of. He attempted that in the bathroom mirror until he gave himself a headache at age fifteen.

“Did you forget about me being an accessory to the plot to separate the mortal world and Halloweentown for all eternity already?” Ethan asks, crossing his arms. He doesn’t look angry, though, instead almost amused, and maybe a little confused.

“No, I didn’t forget, I just—Elissa knows about that?”

“Her and everyone else in Halloweentown. It’s a small community; word gets around. And a lot of people have a friend or family member who was one of the other exchange students, or, for the non-magic users at Witch U, they know they wouldn’t have been accepted if the portal had closed and enrollment had been forced to stay at normal numbers…” He shrugs a little, more awkward than dismissive. “I don’t blame them or anything. Honestly, I’m surprised the faculty have treated me like a regular student so far—the only reason I’m even here to begin with is because your grandma wrote me a letter of recommendation.”

“Yeah, well, I’m only here because of some last-minute nepotism, so. Join the club.” Ethan laughs, which is a victory, and far more thrilling than it should be.

He also rolls his eyes, though. “You would’ve been valedictorian if you hadn’t decided to graduate a year early instead.” Dylan doesn’t really know what to say to that—he isn’t _wrong_ —but Ethan continues, “You know, your grandma’s the only reason I graduated high school.”

“You and Marnie both,” Dylan says, and Ethan thankfully stops looking so damn morose. “If you’d told me at age twelve that Grandma Aggie would be responsible for preserving the educational futures of Halloweentown’s next generation, I would not have believed you, but then again, I spent about eight months trying to convince myself it was all a dream, so maybe I wasn’t the best judge.”

“You don’t say,” Ethan says, smiling smooth and gorgeous.

“Don’t tell pre-teen me,” Dylan responds, “He had a bit of a complex.” 

“Had?” Ethan asks, grinning, which is the same thing Marnie would’ve said, but Ethan’s tone is totally different, less ribbing and more… flirting-adjacent, just maybe. “Don’t worry, I’m not planning on trying out time travel anytime soon. Me at age twelve was no bonfire, either.”

“Fair enough,” Dylan agrees, pushing his cereal around to try to get all of the same color on his spoon. “So how was your first day of classes?” 

They both only have morning classes on Mondays and Fridays, although Dylan has Magical Technology Lab I on Wednesday afternoons, and he spends the rest of lunch listening to Ethan talk about his first lecture in Botany I and some class called Tisanes, Tinctures, & Topicals, marveling at the unfamiliar freedom of eating as long of a lunch as he wants and looking forward to an unstructured afternoon. He’d been so busy rolling his eyes at how Marnie wanted college to be different—there’s such thing as _too_ different, right, and a totally different realm probably makes the cut—that he hadn’t thought much about the things he was looking forward to about it. The schedule, at least, is a nice change.

“So,” Ethan asks as they take their trays to be washed, walking them over rather than simply levitating them like most other magic-using students are doing, which honestly seems like a recipe for spilling food all over someone, “do you have any homework on the first day, or are your professors more merciful than mine?”

“I just had one professor today, actually,” Dylan says, “and yeah, I’ve got some reading to do, but nothing super serious.”

“Well, I have to stir a potion 1,000 times before lab tomorrow, so you win,” Ethan says, and Dylan winces in sympathy. “Want to keep me company while I suffer?” he asks, and Dylan hopes he doesn’t look too surprised when he nods. It’s usually been Dylan talking to Ethan first, which is fine, but the offer is embarrassingly reassuring.

They make their way to the Southeast Wing and then take the wide spiral staircase up to the fourth floor, where its plush burgundy carpeting fades to the dark bluish gray of the dormitory halls. Disguises all sorts of weird stains, Dylan figures. The hall winds and narrows, with a couple of sharp turns that make it seem like they should have doubled back to their starting place, before it opens all of a sudden onto an alcove with a deep orange cushion on a window seat and a single wooden door. 

“This is me,” Ethan says, unlocking room 499. He must be at the outside edge of one of the lower towers; the roof slopes downward at an angle, but half of the wall space consists of three large windows, and the view is incredible. 

“I haven’t gotten the curtains up yet,” he explains, practically glowing in the afternoon sunlight, “The bar is, uh, kind of high, and I didn’t feel like trying to find something to stand on yesterday.”

“Let me know if you want me to help you out,” Dylan says, gesturing to his overall longness, a source of ongoing joking jealousy for Marnie. Ethan doesn’t quite flush, but something unreadable and just possibly promising flickers across his face.

“Thanks, dude. I just might take you up on that.” 

They settle into the space, Dylan on a cushion on the floor, leaning back against the side of Ethan’s bed, which is still honestly way more intimate than it has any business being, and Ethan at his desk, emptying a packet of powder into a small cauldron. He pours water, obtained via the hall bathroom sink, from the fancier-looking cousin of a graduated cylinder into the cauldron and starts to stir. 

“So do you have to count to 1,000?” Dylan asks, curious and incredulous, before realizing that if so, he definitely just made Ethan lose count. 

“Thank the Fae, no. In previous years, students would set a spell to count stirs, but these cauldrons count and display it, see?” He gestures to where a number is, in fact, shimmering in a faint orange above the back of the cauldron lip, vaguely reminiscent of an alarm clock display. As Ethan’s hand makes another pass around the cauldron, the number ticks up to eight. “That way students without magic aren’t at a disadvantage.”

“That’s really cool,” Dylan says, making a mental note to ask Professor Embreis about how it works at their office hours later this week. He starts on his assigned reading, periodically making small talk when Ethan asks a question or sympathetic sounds when he complains, and he’s almost done with Wednesday’s pre-lab reading when Ethan gives a drawn-out groan.

“ _Dude._ I am _going_ to get carpal tunnel.”

“I doubt your professor would do that,” Dylan says, making a mark at where on the scroll he’d stopped. “You couldn’t cast any spells then.”

Ethan’s shoulders seem to stiffen a little. His back is probably killing him, too.

“I don’t know, are hand gestures necessary?” he asks. “I always thought it was more, like, embellishment. Stage presence.”

Dylan launches into an explanation of the three major schools of thought on casting techniques from one of the chapters in his Intro to Magical Theory book, and how each has shaped the activation process for magically-powered technology—because just using a button would make too much sense, apparently—and realizes when Ethan’s cauldron chimes that he’s been rambling uninterrupted for at least fifteen minutes.

He almost apologizes, but then he notices that Ethan is smiling to himself, private and warm, and Dylan closes his mouth.

“Okay, I need to put this under here,” Ethan produces an ornate but faded purple cloth and ties it tightly over the cauldron with a gold ribbon, “to keep it in stasis until lab tomorrow. And now I’m not going to move my wrists for the rest of the day.”

Inaccurate, probably, but fair, Dylan figures. “Here, let me,” he says without really thinking about it when Ethan sits on the bed, reaching for one wrist where Ethan’s other hand is rubbing it. He’d switched hands repeatedly throughout the process, so they’re probably both aching. Ethan lets him take his hand without question or protest, so Dylan resolves to continue not thinking about it while he carefully massages over the sore muscles, fingertips pressing firmly along the bones. Radius, ulna. Carpals—scaphoid, lunate, triquetral, pisiform, hamate, capitate, trapezoid, trapezium. And his hands must be stiff, too, from the way he’s flexing them, so—metacarpals. I, II, III, IV, V, where _Extensor Carpi Ulnaris_ inserts, and back again, to where _Opponens Pollicis_ is making Ethan’s thumb flex like that, small movements towards Dylan’s hands like he isn’t even thinking about it. Involuntary muscle spasm, maybe, which would put this far over Dylan’s pay grade or A&P knowledge, but then Ethan holds his other hand out, so he can’t be doing anything too bad, right? 

Dylan repeats the process, but this time, he’s not thinking about the bones. He’s thinking about how it’s Ethan’s hand, how warm it is. How soft his skin is, lifelines and lingering calluses and fading scars. He swipes his thumb over Ethan’s knuckles before he consciously tells his hand to move, synapses darting too fast through his body for his fear to catch up. 

Dylan lets go of Ethan’s hand and coughs. “Uh. Better?” he asks weakly.

“Yeah,” Ethan says. He sounds like Dylan feels. Like he’s floating. Like he’s speaking from the bottom of a wishing well. “Thank you.”

“Any time,” Dylan says, which feels like too much of a truth to just be let out like that. Like it could bother to be contained by something casual. 

He’s always liked skeletons, Dylan thinks as he lies in bed that night. How neatly everything fits together. How you can trace the connection from one point to another: lift here, and the movement ripples all the way to the end of a limb, an echo of muscles that aren’t there. Even with an empty ribcage, you can picture exactly what’s inside.

On Friday, Ethan catches Dylan on the way to the cafeteria and leads him in the opposite direction, out the castle and to the pennant flapping in the autumn wind at the edge of the university grounds. Embroidered in black on its orange background is a carriage.

“We just finished our first week of college,” Ethan says when Dylan asks for an explanation, “We’re going to get ice cream.” Their classes ended at 11:30, and it was a few minutes’ walk to get to the carriage stop, but they still have some time to kill before the first ride leaves at noon. 

“I thought you and Marnie, like, bonded over brooms in high school,” Dylan says. “Didn’t you have, I don’t know, some fancy model?”

Ethan shrugs. “Yeah, but I know you hate flying.”

That’s true, Dylan really does. Just as he’s deliberating how to say thank you for being so considerate without sounding deeply awkward, a haunting scream echoes around them.

“I really need to change that ringtone,” he says, flipping open the witch’s glass on his watchband. “Hey, Mom.”

“Hey, pumpkin,” she says, and she’s definitely loud enough and Ethan’s definitely close enough for him to hear, but Dylan resolutely does not wince. Mom is really fragile right now. “I just wanted to say congrats on the first week. How are things?”

“Good,” Dylan says, “Ethan and I are going to get ice cream to celebrate before our weekends get consumed by the reading for Professor Nimane’s class, the one I was telling you about Tuesday.”

Ethan groans. “Don’t remind me.” 

The class, officially titled Buried in Brocéliande: A History of (Im)Mortality, is honestly really interesting, but the material is incredibly dense, and Dylan is not a fan of the level of introspection required for the reflective writing assignments due each class period. There aren’t any other mortals (well, half-mortals) on campus besides him and Marnie, who has been too busy soaking up the college experience and her newfound distance from their mom to have a conversation with him longer than exchanged heys in the hallway, so an entire course on the history of mortality in magic users of legend and real life is… a lot to process, even though it’s as fascinating as he hoped when he registered for it.

“Ethan Dalloway?” Dylan’s mom asks, and he nods. 

“Yeah, he’s here if you want to say hi.”

“Sure,” she says, and Dylan tugs Ethan into view by his sleeve. His mom waves.

“Hi, Ethan. How is Witch U?”

“Hi, Mrs. Piper,” he says, waving stiffly. He practically radiates tension, enough for even Dylan to pick up on from this close. “It’s going pretty well so far. I’m excited about my major, even though we kind of hit the sky flying from day one.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” she says, and Ethan swallows. Dylan tries not to think about how he was paying close enough attention to Ethan’s mouth-jaw-throat vicinity to notice.

“Listen, Mrs. Piper, I want to apologize for my actions a year ago.” 

Dylan’s mom isn’t as generous as he was; she lets Ethan stumble his way through a detailed and remorseful paragraph before she nods, face in her trademark neutral expression that Dylan is all too familiar with, although usually it’s Marnie on the receiving end of it. 

“Hey, Mom, we’ve got to go. The carriage to town is pulling up,” he interjects.

“Have a good time, boys,” she says. “And Ethan?”

“Yes, ma’am?” he says, visibly far more petrified than when he confronted his father in a haunted house in a dimension he still barely knew. 

“Apology accepted,” she says, and Ethan lets out a breath. “But if you ever put my children in danger again, I have no qualms about opening some portals of my own.”

“Understood,” says Ethan. 

_“Mom,”_ says Dylan. 

He still says he loves her too before hanging up, because he does, even when it feels like she’s trying to cause him to die from embarrassment. And then they board the carriage, which is, of course, pulled by skeleton horses, because this is his life now. It’s the kind of thing Marnie was hoping for when she envisioned her arrival to Witch University, and he hopes she isn’t too dedicated to her broom to give it a try sometime. 

Honestly, even without a person to steer it, the carriage drives better than Benny.

Since they’re the only passengers on the carriage, it takes them all the way to the ice cream shop. Ethan gets out first and holds out a hand to help Dylan down, which is kind of unnecessary but certainly not unwanted. “Time to ruin our appetites,” he says, grinning, and holds the door open.

Dylan is maybe kind of a bit wonderstruck.

“Holy shit,” he breathes, thankfully quiet because they’re in public and there are probably kids around somewhere, not that he’s looking because he’s busy realizing that the windows to the shop aren’t glass, they’re _ice,_ and the bricks in the walls aren’t made of cement and mortar, they’re ice and packed snow. It is, in the most literal sense, marvelous, not because it looks like something out of a Disney film but because the inside somehow still remains the temperature of a pleasant sunny day, not hot enough to make him sweat but enough to make him excited for the frozen treat he was previously pretty indifferent to. 

“This defies the laws of physics,” Dylan says, looking at Ethan, who is already looking at him, a faint—and maybe fond?—smile on his face. “Like, seriously, I am currently taking advanced applied physics at a magical university, which is bizarre enough on its own, and I’m pretty sure this breaks even the laws that are supposed to apply to _this_ dimension.”

“...Is that a good thing?” Ethan asks hesitantly.

“It’s miraculous,” Dylan says, and Ethan beams. There was a time when just setting foot in here would have sent him into a spiral of panic, and like, there’s plenty of time for him to freak the fuck out about it in his dorm room later, but he’s trying that whole radical acceptance thing the counselor recommended on Wednesday: there’s nothing he can do to change the fact that he’s here, other than dropping out and thereby forcing Marnie to drop out and guaranteeing she’ll hate him forever, so he might as well roll with the proverbial magical punches. And boy, did this one take his breath away.

When he makes the effort not to be terrified by it, the shop really is incredibly fucking cool. When a waiter ice skates across the floor that wasn’t the slightest bit slippery under Dylan’s tennis shoes, he just—laughs, and Ethan grins at him. Again, there might be an existential freakout building somewhere in his psyche, but that’s a problem for a later Dylan, one who isn’t busy analyzing Ethan’s offer to share. 

They end up getting separate ice creams, because he might be in a magical alternate dimension on a suspiciously datelike friendly hangout in a literal ice palace with a cute boy, but like, _germs._ He tries not to think too hard about how the Jack Frost-looking waiter’s frost breath froze the ice cream in front of them; a certain level of sub-zero temperature has got to kill eubacteria, right?

“Oh, god, are there magical bacteria?” he asks, and Ethan, rather than look concerned, smiles. 

“Not that I’m aware of, and I am the closest thing to a bio major we have, so. Honestly, that was one of the strangest adjustments to the mortal world; like, trolls and werewolves are silly make-believe, but there are thousands of tiny creatures around you at any given moment that could infect you or, like, help digest your food? Bizarre.”

“Well, when you put it that way,” Dylan says, grinning, and breaks off a piece of his waffle cone to dip into the bowl. 

“Hey, uh,” he says once they’ve finished their dessert and paid and are on their way to the carriage stop in the town square, “could I get the info to call your witch’s glass? I think I’m gonna have some questions about Professor Nimane’s homework this weekend, to be honest.”

Ethan winces, and Dylan briefly panics that he didn’t come off nearly as casual and platonic as he was trying for before Ethan says, “I don’t have one anymore.” He coughs. “Uh, a lot of bad memories around that.”

Oh, shit. Yeah, if Dylan’s dad had trapped one of his closest friends in his cell phone with the intent to keep her there forever and frame her disappearance as a hate crime murder, he probably wouldn’t make phone calls anymore, either. 

“Shit, my bad, that makes total sense.” Ethan looks relieved, which makes Dylan feel bad, because it really is understandable, and he wouldn’t have owed Dylan his info or anything even if he didn’t have a solid and traumatizing excuse. 

“But I do have a headphone,” Ethan says quickly, “let me give you my number.” So he does—the first guy’s number Dylan’s ever gotten, even platonically, and it was tapped in via the teeth on a dayglo skull. And maybe the difference in how his life is going in Halloweentown compared to high school is the world itself, or maybe it’s just one of those inherent things about college that everyone keeps talking about, but right now, whatever it is, he’ll take it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for folks who’ve seen return to halloweentown, i maintain that “healthy appetite. i like that in a girl” is the worst line in the entire series, and that’s saying a lot. rewatching that scene was like 45% of the motivation to write this fic because i had to edit it out lmao


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much to everyone who’s been reading!! <3
> 
> shoutout to xphro for a really great conversation about magical mechanics & worldbuilding and for all of their ideas about halloweentown, a lot of which will show up in future chapters!

It starts because Marnie has, unsurprisingly, roped Dylan into helping with her homework.

She’s double majoring in Witchcraft and History of Halloweentown, preparation for her role as the first new resident Cromwell witch in two generations, which Dylan has to admit is a pretty logical choice for fields of study. The problem is, it means that she has an Introduction to Spell Creation midterm due at the same time as her ten-page Overview of Halloweentown Species and Cultures paper, so while she’s up to her elbows in pumpkin guts (Like, literal organs. He isn’t even going to ask.) Dylan is summarizing useful primary sources. 

He’s pouring over three years’ worth of issues of the _Halloweentown Gazette_ when he sees it, taking his time rather than using magic to speed read. His midterm exams were all at the beginning of the week—he got all jack-o-lanterns, which is apparently a good thing—and Ethan has spent every waking moment stirring some potion or another for the past four days, so it’s not like he has anything better to do. Plus, sometimes he just likes the feeling of paper in his hands. 

_DALLOWAY ESTATE AUCTIONED FOR 491 GOLDEN PUMPKINS,_ the headline blares. Dylan checks the date—it’s from the middle of last November, almost 11 months ago. He skims the front page article, catching a few phrases: sentenced to eternity in prison, Dalloway heir, unprecedented scale, not available for comment. 

Dylan does some quick mental math. That comes out to about $385,000 US dollars, which, he knows from all the college brochures he was looking at before Marnie made the decision for him, is approximately the cost of sending nine students to public colleges. 

All of the other exchange students from last year went to college in the mortal world, he knows, even the ones who didn’t come back to finish high school there once it was revealed that Edgar Dalloway was the cause of the anti-monster vitriol. He spent weeks helping Mom and Grandma Aggie falsify documents for their applications. And Ethan certainly doesn’t act like someone in possession of a small fortune, especially by Halloweentown’s modest standards; Dylan’s seen him use his cauldron to boil just as many instant noodles as he has potions over the past few weeks. So it’s not proof, exactly, but it is a hunch, even a reasonable one at that, and that last bit _—not available for comment—_ reminds Dylan that he’s been wondering what, exactly, Ethan did between disappearing from his life and showing right back up in it.

“I told you,” Ethan says when Dylan asks, a polite twenty-four hours after his Tisanes, Tinctures, & Topicals midterm was due, “I worked for your grandma.”

“Yeah, over the summer, you said. But what about, like, November through April?” 

Ethan shrugs, but something’s off—he looks way more casual than usual, in a practiced way. Normally, some part of him is always fidgeting or bouncing or making noise. “Moped around for a few weeks. Started talking to your grandma again. Sold my dad’s shit.” He swallows, tapping his fingers on his thigh, and looks up at Dylan. “Learned how to live.” 

Oh. “Sorry,” Dylan says, nervously adjusting his glasses, “I probably shouldn’t have asked.” 

“Don’t sweat it,” Ethan says, with a smile that only looks a little forced, and Dylan successfully recognizes the cue to change the subject and does so, but he doesn’t stop wondering about it—why and how did Ethan get in contact with Grandma Aggie so soon after leaving their house? Why did she never say anything about him? Was he all alone for six months in a world that didn’t trust him anymore?

“Now, dear, I think you know those are questions Ethan will have to answer for you himself when he’s ready,” Grandma Aggie’s voice says from the violently bright skull that night. Dylan sighs. Since when did she start being mature and reasonable? 

“Oh, but I am so glad you two are still close,” she says. “I had hoped you would both find a friend at school. Oh, and speaking of boy friends—are you taking anyone to the Halloween ball?” 

Dylan rolls his eyes before telling her that no, he isn’t, and yes, he loves her, too, and no, he would not like to join her and Sophie in the Middle Ages for fall break—“Oh, just part of it, dear, you’d still be able to catch up on your sleep and all, we’d only hit the tourist highlights”—but thanks for the offer, and hangs up. 

He calls his mom.

He’s been missing her a lot lately. Sure, he still updates her every week or so that no, Marnie is not dead or under a stasis spell, just avoiding her calls, and he tells her about his classes some—he left out the part about how they read an article about her for his History of (Im)Mortality class, because that would probably make her even more uncomfortable than it did him—but he misses being around her. He misses how she made things make _sense._ Dylan didn’t realize how much he loved how normal his life was until he was twelve and it wasn’t anymore and he knew no matter how hard he and Mom tried, it would never go back. 

He gets why Marnie needs to be here, he really does; she’d been a square peg suffocating in a round hole her whole life, and she finally found her square hole when she was thirteen. He isn’t going to deny her the opportunity to fit, to be someplace where things make sense to her. But Dylan hasn’t ever fit anywhere—he isn’t even a peg at all, more like a piece of paper wondering why it keeps getting crumpled up to fit in these containers. 

Right before they fought Kalabar, when his fingers started humming like he’d touched a dozen doorknobs in sock feet, even before he thought _This can’t be happening,_ he’d thought, _This explains everything._ But it didn’t, not really. For Marnie—and Sophie, even—Halloweentown made them make sense to themselves. It was the answer to why they’d always felt so out of place. Dylan, though, feels just as out of place here as in the mortal world, neither environment ever settling into something that felt like it was supposed to hold him.

He thinks his mom knows how that feels. 

“Hey, pumpkin,” she says when she answers, and he almost tears up. God. Just over two weeks until fall break, he reminds himself, and is comfortingly distracted by wondering why they still refer to months according to the Northern Hemisphere mortal seasons if it’s always autumn here. 

“Hey, Mom,” he says, smiling. It’s such a relief to see her, even tiny through the glass on his watchband. 

“Oh, honey, are you okay?” she asks, and he nods quickly.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m just—it’s been a long week.” 

“Midterms are the worst, no matter what dimension you’re in,” she agrees. 

“How’s the pack doing?” he asks, shifting to a more comfortable position on his bed. He can’t keep from smiling when her face lights up.

“They’re good—Chester finally found some clothes that fit in both his forms. Turns out sweatpants are a lifesaver. And Natalie has gotten the hang of the detergent to clothing ratio after the last soap suds incident.” 

Dylan laughs. He hadn’t been sure how serving as the de facto expat host house for Halloweentown students going to college in the mortal world would suit her, but he shouldn’t have worried; she’s taken to the role with characteristic dedication and color-coded spreadsheets. It fits her really well, too, the more he thinks about it—who better to help Halloweentown residents adjust to a new realm than the only recorded person to do so before them? The secret hallway in their house has expanded for students who prefer to live with other beings from their world, and those who stay in the dorms or apartments come by for dinner every couple of weekends. Everyone enrolling in a mortal university has to take a three-week crash course on basic mortal culture and life skills, too. That was the only time Mom went back to Halloweentown since she came to get them when he was twelve—she marched right up to the mayor and city council and asked how they expected their kids to not get arrested, hospitalized, or expelled, going in with zero preparation for mortal society, and were they going to teach them or was she?

“If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself,” she told Dylan that evening, sweeping back in through the front door with all the self-assuredness of the woman raised to be the Cromwell heir and all the grit of the woman who’d chosen to leave it behind. “Help me add a dozen rooms to this hall.”

Now, six students are living there full-time, and Mom has purchased a minivan. (“You’re the only one under my roof I trust to drive.”) Dylan is pretty sure his fall break will be chaos, but at least the local university will still have classes then, and besides, he’s kind of looking forward to talking to other people his age who know what electricity and CDs are. 

That reminds him of something, though—Mom reading off the zeroed tuition balances for the Halloweentown students who went to high school with him and shrugging. “Your grandma said it was ‘almost like magic’ and winked, so I wasn’t about to ask,” he remembers her saying, and his hunch develops into a full-blown hypothesis.

“Glad to hear it,” Dylan says, and as if she can tell what’s got him so distracted, Mom asks how Ethan is doing. 

“Good,” Dylan says, “Got through his midterms in one piece. I think I pushed a little too hard asking about where he went last year, but I’m pretty sure we’re cool now.”

“People are entitled to their privacy,” she says in the voice she uses to explain such things to Grandma Aggie, and he turns his wrist to an angle where she can’t see him for a second to roll his eyes. 

“I know, Mom.” He blames that comment for what he says next, because he’s desperate enough for a change of subject that he doesn’t take the time to properly filter it. “I think Grandma Aggie thinks I should ask him to the Halloween Ball.” 

Mom raises her eyebrows, but all she says is, “As long as you’re doing it because you want to, not because she thinks you should.”

“I didn’t say I was doing it,” he corrects, then pauses. “Wait, seriously? I thought you’d have, I don’t know, qualms about him.”

She shrugs, a little too stiff to be casual, and gives a self-deprecating smile. “What can I say, I’m just glad that one of my kids will talk to me about boys.”

“Yeah, the wrong one,” he says before he can stop himself. Apparently his filter has taken the whole day off. 

“Oh, sweetie, no,” she says, reaching toward the glass, and he thinks for a second that she’s going to open a portal right now to his room just to give him a hug. He almost wishes she would.

She doesn’t, which speaks to all the progress she and her new counselor have made about boundaries, but she keeps her arm out, cradling the edge of the glass like she’s cupping his cheek. “Dylan, I should’ve told you this a long time ago, but I’m so sorry for being the reason you were raised in a world that’s so hostile to who you are, to the point where you’ve never even told me directly who that is.” She wipes her eyes. “It wasn’t on purpose—I didn’t even think about that when I made the decision to stay here after your dad died, but I should have. And—and if you decide that you want to stay somewhere where you can love openly without being hurt for that, I understand, and I’ll support you.”

“Mom,” he says, choked up, and just cries for a minute, tears falling slow and hot down his face. “Thank you,” he says eventually, wiping his cheeks with the back of his hand. “I mean, I’m not taking moving to Boston or something off the table, but I’m not planning on leaving the mortal world forever. I don’t think I could go that long without charging my Game Boy,” he jokes, and she laughs even as she blows her nose. 

“I love you, pumpkin.”

“I love you, too, Mom. And I just want you to know—I don’t, like, hate myself or anything. It’s just… hard, sometimes.” 

She nods, and visibly squares her shoulders, smooths her hair back. _Alright, that’s enough of that._ Dylan smiles. He and his mom are very similar people.

“Well, you’ll love the Halloween Ball, whether you go with someone or not,” she says, and he raises an eyebrow, like, _Me? The guy who has never had a moment of fun at a school dance in his life?_ She smiles. “It was always my favorite night of the year in college.” 

Dylan blinks, surprised. Mom never talks about Halloweentown; he wasn’t even sure she’d gone to Witch U until Professor Nimane mentioned it when their class read that article. He knows what she’s doing, trading a piece of herself in recognition of the confession he’s just given her, and he appreciates it, which is why he’ll never say anything about it.

“So,” she says, and he can hear the sound of her dusting her hands off on her jeans, “you’ll need a suit—I’ll send you some money to get one in town. And for Marnie to get a new dress, too.”

“Thanks, Mom,” he says, and she nods.

“You’ll have to tell me all about it. Or—tell me as much about it as you want.”

“I will,” he says, and he closes his eyes and holds the witch’s glass to his chest for a long moment after he hangs up. 

Dylan takes a long nap, exhausted from the emotional conversation, then goes to knock on Marnie’s door. “Just a minute!” he hears her call over the sound of giggling, and when she opens the door, he sees her friend Aneesa in the room behind her. 

“Hey,” he says, “Mom gave me some money for us to get nice clothes for the dance, so just let me know when you’re free and we can go shopping in town.”

“I’m free now,” Marnie says brightly, and rolls her eyes at his startled expression. “Come on, Dylan, I know you probably wanted to schedule this at least seventy-two hours in advance, but it’s a Friday afternoon, I already know you don’t have much homework—let’s go shopping.”

He sighs. She does, regrettably, have a point; if he waits, there’s no telling how many assignments he’ll have to balance with watching Marnie try on half the clothes in Halloweentown. “Okay,” he says.

“Great! Is it cool if Aneesa comes too?”

“Yeah, sure, as long as I also get to bring backup.” It might be good to have a buffer, anyways. He and Marnie have been talking more lately than they did at the beginning of the semester—she started coming to the Students for the Inclusion of Mortals meetings when he asked if she’d be interested, and they even get dinner together sometimes—but they can still get at each other’s throats with the same efficiency they always have. 

“Cool,” she says, “meet you at the carriage stop in half an hour,” and closes the door in his face. Typical. 

Dylan calls Elissa on his headphone, and thankfully, she was planning on going into town this weekend anyway and says she’d love to join them. He isn’t really comfortable with the thought of trying on a bunch of clothes in front of Ethan, and it’s not like he has any other friends. Cypress has been cool the handful of times they’ve chatted, but Dylan definitely doesn’t know ver like that. 

When they get to the carriage stop, Elissa presses a button on the sign pole that notifies them to send a hoverchair-accessible one, and she floats up the ramp before lowering her chair to touch the floor of the carriage so she can put the parking brake on. 

“Hey, Elissa,” Marnie says. Beside her, Aneesa gives a little wave. The times they’ve each joined Ethan and Dylan at their corner table for lunch have overlapped on occasion over the past two months; “I trust your judgement,” Elissa had said, shrugging, when Dylan had looked at her in surprise the first time she didn’t head off to a different section of the cafeteria after Magical Communication, and she’s eaten with them most Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays since then. 

Marnie stares in open-mouthed delight at the skeleton horses the whole ride to town, looking just as thrilled and casually confident as she did at thirteen, and Dylan knows he’d make the decision to enroll here a hundred times over if it means putting that expression on her face. God, he really does love her more than anything. She grabs his hand to hurry him up like they’re kids again as they debark the carriage, him always a few steps behind her as she bounded off to whatever adventure but never straying any further than that, and he’s suddenly so damn glad to be going to college with her rather than a whole dimension apart that he pulls her into a quick hug after he steps down. 

She squeezes back, then darts off down Main Street, pointing at shops to Aneesa as Elissa and Dylan trail behind them. When they pass the ice cream shop, he’s so distracted thinking about how Ethan took his hand to help him out of the carriage that first week that he doesn’t catch a word of what Elissa is saying.

She floats close enough to him to poke him in the side. “Dare I ask what you’re daydreaming about?” To his horror, he blushes, and she grins. “Or should I say _who_ you’re daydreaming about?”

Dylan covers his face with his hands. Occasionally he remembers that he’s inherited his family’s trademark tendency towards the dramatic. “No, you shouldn’t.”

“Hmm,” Elissa drawls, and when he peeks out from between his fingers, her eyes are sparkling. “Is it maybe someone blonde and style challenged?”

Dylan shoves his hands in his pockets, figuring blocking his sight any longer would be a safety hazard, and checks that Marnie and Aneesa are far enough away that they won’t overhear. “...Maybe,” he admits, and as much as he hates this, it feels good to say it.

“I _knew_ it!” Elissa cries. “He wore that neon yellow suit at the end of September and you kept looking at him without a trace of disgust when I couldn't do more than glance out the corner of my eye without permanently scarring my color receptors.” Dylan groans, and she looks up at him, delighted. “So. Spill.”

“No, no no,” he protests, wondering why he had to go and surround himself with powerful women. The ones he’s related to, he can’t really help, but he chose to become friends with Elissa, which clearly proves that he has the same horrific decision-making abilities as his siblings, because she is going to force every gory, lovey-dovey detail out of him, and it’s going to be awful. 

Elissa raises an eyebrow. He swears and caves.

“We cuddled while watching a movie last weekend and I thought I was going to die,” he admits, and she honest-to-god squeals. They’d rented the projector and a film reel from the library (which Dylan still wants to check out again someday to figure out how it works) and watched an old, not-so-scary movie in black and white. When the two main witches had kissed at the end as pumpkin-shaped fireworks exploded above them, he could feel Ethan’s eyes on him.

He knows Elissa will wrestle all of this out of him sooner or later, so he tells her, and she stares at him for so long he wonders if he’s done something wrong.

“So you’re asking him to the ball,” she says finally, and it’s not a question.

“Um, no,” he says, and gives her a look as they approach the store Marnie and Aneesa have just entered. She gives him a look right back that clearly says this conversation isn’t over. 

Sometimes, he thinks, having friends makes life so much harder. 

Marnie, easily thrilled as always, finds her perfect dress in the first place they stop, which turns out to be a thrift store. She spins in front of the full-length mirror, beaming in a knee-length purple dress that flares out when she twirls and somehow manages to look classy even with the orange jack-o-lanterns around its hem. Dylan pays, and she cheers loud enough to merit an annoyed look from the shopkeeper when there’s enough left for her to buy shoes later.

At the third store, Aneesa buys a floor-length golden dress with those flowy sleeves that have a slit from shoulder to wrist and a fabric band at the end. When she comes out of the dressing room, Marnie stares at her so long Dylan asks if she forgot how to blink. 

“I’m thinking about asking her to the Halloween Ball,” Marnie admits instead of snapping at him while Aneesa checks out. Dylan glances at her. Huh.

“College is a time of self-discovery,” he intones. She socks him in the arm. 

“She’ll say yes,” he says after a minute. She looks up at him, biting her lip, uncharacteristically uncertain.

“You really think so?”

“You know how you were looking at her just now?” Marnie blushes, which he figures is a yes. “That’s how she was looking at you when you tried your dress on.” She smiles to herself and looks reasonably reassured, and he remembers that beneath their twelve respective layers of bullshit, she really does care about his opinion.

Elissa emerges from a dressing room in a midnight blue pantsuit with tiny stars on the blazer and spins her chair in a circle, beaming. The color looks gorgeous with her silver skin and long black hair, and her chair has changed from its usual swirl of pink, green, and gold to a sparkly white. 

“You look stunning,” he tells her genuinely, and then, teasing, “Maybe I should take you to the dance instead.” 

“Don’t even think about trying to get out of it that easily,” she says. “Besides, Bryss and Hudson asked me.” 

He’s met Bryss, a wizard in their Magic Tech classes, and he’s familiar with xyr boyfriend Hudson by proximity. “Spill,” he deadpans, and she blushes. 

“Okay, I deserved that one. I’ll tell you— _after_ we find you a suit.”

That goal, much to Dylan’s rapidly escalating dismay, takes a solid two hours and trips to all three of Halloweentown’s remaining clothing stores to accomplish. Elissa refuses to let him leave with any of the suits he deems good enough, and Marnie and Aneesa aren’t any help at all, just looking on in amusement as Dylan tries on outfit after outfit like some sort of fashionable Sisyphus. 

Finally, Elissa hands him a hanger full of fabric that at first appears solid black, but on closer inspection shimmers with purple undertones. “This is the one,” she says, with all the gravity of a prophet. 

“I sure hope so,” Dylan mutters, and steps into the dressing room for the thousandth time. There isn’t a mirror in the room, only the full mirrored wall outside of the stalls, but he can tell Elissa was right just from the way the fabric moves when he reaches his arm out to open the door. 

“I am a genius,” Elissa decrees, and to his horror, Marnie and Aneesa nod. He’ll admit, though, that he does look good, and feels good, too. Instead of a traditional suit, it’s slacks, a white button down, the same black-purple color tie, and a long-sleeved sweater. He feels startlingly comfortable, and he knows Elissa can tell just by looking at him that she’s right. 

He buys the outfit, and Marnie, who found and purchased her matching shoes somewhere between suits four and twelve, announces that their success deserves coffee, so they pile themselves and their bags into a corner table at the nearby café. Dylan uses the last of the clothing funds his mom sent to buy everyone’s drinks and five shortbread cookies. Elissa smirks at him when he wraps one in a napkin, puts it in a pumpkin-printed paper bag to prevent any crumbs spilling, and tucks it carefully into the bag with his clothes. He makes a face back at her. 

The coffee and cookies are good, and they mostly eat and drink without talking, which is a relief after the extended socializing. The carriage back to campus drops them off just in time for Dylan to meet Ethan at their usual dinner table, ignoring Elissa’s knowing look as she floats towards the flying platform to get to her room for some instant noodles and a nap. 

He sets the cookie bag down in front of Ethan, who looks up, surprised. “What’s this?”

Dylan shrugs. “Open it and find out.”

“Holy shit, thank you, dude,” Ethan says when he opens it, taking a bite and continuing with his mouth half-full, “These are my favorite.”

“Yeah,” Dylan says, because _I know_ feels like it’d be giving too much away. 

After a quiet dinner, the dining hall mostly empty as students leave campus for the weekend or the evening, Dylan starts to feel like a human being again. Or, half-human being. Whatever. So when Ethan says, “Hey, can I talk to you about something?” and then, glancing at the handful of students scattered around the room, “Uh, privately?” Dylan doesn’t ask if it can wait until tomorrow. 

He blinks at him. “Sure.”

“My room?” Ethan asks, standing, and Dylan nods and follows him.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is So sappy, hope y’all enjoy
> 
> also! my dylan/ethan playlist is here if you’re interested: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4GYf0yj995g31Qe6ehWaAH?si=dw_dhCsTR7CUmCo-A2CbpQ

“I’ve been wanting to tell you this for a while,” Ethan starts once they’re both seated, Ethan on the edge of his bed and Dylan facing him in the desk chair. “I just—once I decided I should, I didn’t know how to, and then the longer I waited the more I worried you’d hate me for not telling you sooner.” His gelled hair sticks out in weird directions from where he’s been running his hands through it, which under different circumstances would be really funny.

Part of Dylan had hoped, wildly and without reason and entirely against his will, that Ethan was bringing him here to, like, confess his love or something. Or, if love was pushing it, then crush. Moderate attraction. Et cetera. 

That clearly isn’t what’s going on. 

“Hey, it’s okay,” Dylan says, “I’m not going to hate you,” because unless the next words out of Ethan’s mouth are  _ I’m secretly still working for my dad and plotting to bring about the permanent separation of the dimensions, have fun never seeing half of your family again,  _ there's nothing that could cause Dylan to hate him, and Edgar Dalloway is firmly inaccessible via any available communication methods, so. Plus, Ethan’s made it clear that he thinks his dad’s a dick. 

“Okay,” Ethan says, taking a deep breath, and Dylan, for once, keeps his mouth shut. “Uh, so I know I left out a lot of details when you asked what I did after leaving the mortal world last year—no, don’t look at me like that, I know I don’t have to tell you. I want to.

“So I go through the portal, right, go to my old bedroom, manage a little bit of what could technically qualify as sleep. The next day, I testify at my father’s trial, and when I come back home—uh, when I come back to our old house, I’m, like, pacing, I’m crying a lot, and I’m thinking, of all fucking things, about the drama club. I was so excited when we started rehearsals.” Dylan remembers. Ethan had talked about the play nonstop for weeks. 

“I had never met a human before coming to your high school, obviously. And I know that, like, high schoolers probably aren’t the best sample size of any given species’ moral fiber, but the theater kids—they didn’t care that I didn’t know how to dress like a human, or that I kept forgetting I wasn’t supposed to talk about liking boys, or that I said weird stuff and never knew the cultural touchstones they would reference. They still treated me like I belonged. Like I mattered. My dad…” He pauses. Clears his throat. “My dad never did that.” 

Ethan takes a deep breath. “And your mom—Fae, dude, I was so relieved when you put me on the call with her at the beginning of the semester and she didn’t want to curse the ground I was standing on. I still don’t understand that, to be honest, but I’m grateful, because I respect her so much. I’d heard whisperings, you know, growing up, rumors,  _ Aggie Cromwell’s kid left one day and never came back, _ but I didn’t really get how big a deal it was until I was there, in that world, with a whole group of people just as out of place as I was and still hopelessly overwhelmed. I don’t know how she did it on her own.

“So I’m pacing the hallways of this house where I grew up, thinking about human theater nerds and Gwen Piper née Cromwell and—and you, how you have magic but you don’t use it, not the way I was raised to, not the way my dad wanted me to, and I—he made it seem so innate, you know? Every magic user is tolerant and every mortal is a bigot. And then it turned out my dad was a bigot because of that very worldview, and also power-hungry and violent, and then I just thought… I don’t need magic to be a good person. And maybe I need to not have magic to make room for growing into that person, you know?”

Pieces are slotting together in Dylan’s brain, and he has to work to keep his jaw from dropping. Ethan keeps talking. 

“So I sat down on my bed, and I looked at my hands, and I thought,  _ I want these hands to be mortal hands. I’m thankful for the magic that has flowed through them, but I want it to flow elsewhere.  _ And then—it did.”

Dylan is quiet for a long, long time, can’t put words together that could even come close to responding to that even when he can tell Ethan is staring at him nervously.

“Holy shit,” he whispers finally, and it’ll have to do. “I didn’t even think that was possible.”

Ethan spreads his hands. Dylan watches the way each finger moves. Carpals, metacarpals, phalanges. “I don’t think anything is impossible.”

And to Ethan’s obvious shock, Dylan—who is half-warlock, who never wanted magic and knows even now that he will keep its steady current in his marrow anyway, who is enrolled at a magical university out of love for a sister who found a place to belong even when that place wasn’t supposed to exist—tilts his head back and laughs. 

Eventually, they end up laying side by side in Ethan’s bed, Ethan filling Dylan in on more of the details of their months apart. He hadn’t thought through how accustomed he’d been to using magic for everyday tasks, he’d explained, and he’d spent a solid two weeks living off of canned fruits and peanut butter out of the jar before Aggie Cromwell knocked on the door. 

“All she would say was that she’d had a feeling I needed a friend,” Ethan says, shaking his head with a smile at the memory. “And then, you know, I sold the house and she taught me how to, like, boil water and fold laundry.”

“Wait,  _ my grandma  _ taught you how to do things  _ without  _ magic?” Dylan asks, and Ethan shrugs.

“She said she’d learned a lot from your mom. Something about never knowing when you were going to need a diversified skill set.”

“God, I hope she tells Mom that someday,” Dylan says. “That would really do a lot for their relationship.”

They’re quiet for a moment, and then Dylan asks something that’s been on his mind since the moment Ethan said he was mortal now. “Is it okay if I tell my mom? No one else, not even Marnie, and Mom can keep a secret, I just—” he shrugs weakly. “It’s not a bad thing, but it’s still a lot to process. I think it’d help for me to talk it out with someone.”

“Yeah, that’s okay,” Ethan says. “Could you let me know how she reacts?”

Dylan nods, and he can feel Ethan’s hair brush the side of his face when he does. He turns slightly to look at him before he says the next thing. 

God, their faces are really close.

“Okay, I have one last question, if that’s okay,” Dylan says, and Ethan nods. “Did you miss anything from the mortal world when you came back?”

“Yeah,” Ethan says softly. “You.”

Dylan can hear his own intake of breath, can see the way Ethan’s eyelashes flutter when he glances briefly, just the barest flicker of movement, at Dylan’s mouth. He remembers his grandma saying magic is very simple: all you have to do is want something and let yourself have it. But Dylan’s never been any good with that—the magic and the wanting both. 

“I missed the way you were always the first one up in the morning,” Ethan continues, and instead of breaking the moment, it extends it, encapsulates them in stasis in this space, inches apart and holding their breath. “I missed the way you would talk about your classes, translate the material into concepts I could understand. I missed how you were always the one to drive me home from rehearsal, and how my favorite cereal was always on the shopping list in your handwriting, and how you’d tap your pencil against your chin when you knew you were close to figuring a physics problem out. I missed you showing me music you liked, or listening to me talk about the play, or rolling your eyes when I used magic for something frivolous like passing you the remote. I just missed you. And I thought I was never going to see you again, or that if I did, you’d be furious with me, or maybe ignore me altogether if I was lucky, and then there you were my first day on campus, waving at me like nothing had even happened, being my friend again, sitting in my bed—”

Dylan has an unfortunate amount of experience with being brave because he has to be, because there’s a would-be overlord cackling nearby and bravery is what’s expected of him solely as a result of his family line. Because he has no other choice. Right now, though, is something wholly different; he feels like being brave simply because he  _ wants _ to.

When he moves his hand over to rest it on top of Ethan’s, it’s because he wants to more than he’s ever wanted anything for himself in his life, more than he wanted to pinch himself and wake up in his own bed in a fully human body at age twelve, more than he wanted to hurry up and graduate and leave high school behind him, more than he wanted to be the kind of person who could say fuck it and go to MIT with no regard for his older sister’s dreams. 

He wants to say so much he can feel the words pressing at the seams of him, desperate to get out, and so he lets them. You have to be open to magic for it to flow through you, he knows, a conduit, which is why he’s only ever been able to use it under extreme duress or occasional intense scientific curiosity. Dylan knows words, though, has only ever gotten reprimanded growing up for saying too much, has accepted the role of distraction during Marnie’s misadventures with relief because it gives him an outlet, a way to balance the pressure gradient of sentences spoken versus trapped between his teeth, so he lets them flow through him now like something powerful, shapes each syllable like a spell. 

“I missed you, too,” he says, and Ethan turns his own hand under Dylan’s, interlocks their fingers. “You always listened to me. Even when I thought I was just rambling to the air, I’d stop and you’d ask a question about some really specific detail, or you’d—” he swallows hard, struck to the core all over again with the intimacy of it, “you’d do a spell to keep my pencil sharpened when you thought I wasn’t paying attention. But I—god, Ethan, I was always paying attention to you. You’d walk in a room and it’d be like I could see new wavelengths of light, everything was that different. And I thought—I thought, hey, the haunted house closes a little before the rest of the fair, maybe—maybe he’ll want to go on the Ferris wheel with me, maybe we’ll—and instead we got, like, a fun new mountain of trauma, and then you were gone.” Dylan doesn’t dare look at Ethan’s expression. He doesn’t think he could bear it. “And I felt your absence fucking everywhere. I kept trying to tell myself, like, be logical, you didn’t even know this dude for three months. But it was like a black hole, you know? Everything ended up back at this gap where you weren’t.

“And then I get here, and I see you, and I should be pissed—not because of the shit with your dad, but because, like, you didn’t write, you were apparently living with my fucking grandma and the only thing I knew about you was that your dad was in jail and you weren’t—and I know, I know that’s not fucking fair, like, you were going through an enormous amount of shit, you probably didn’t want to risk retraumatizing me or whatever other self-disparaging shit your brain was telling you, I get it, I just—you weren’t just this guy I thought I maybe could’ve fallen in love with, you know? You were my first real friend I wasn’t related to.”

There’s that out, then, with a gravity all its own, and nothing he can do to reverse the course of its orbit. 

Ethan’s hand, the one that isn’t still holding his, comes forward to gently, even timidly, tilt Dylan’s chin up until Dylan meets Ethan’s eyes. 

“Could’ve?” Ethan asks, and it might’ve been cocky, once, if they were a year younger, if things hadn’t gone the way they did, but they’re here, history and all, and he sounds just barely too hopeful to be fully terrified. 

“Could,” Dylan admits, squeezing his hand, and Ethan lets out a long, slow breath and tucks his head up against Dylan’s chest. There’s so much of the too-sharp seventeen-year-old him in the movement, the boy who talked about how they all might die not just because his dad had ordered him to keep tensions high but because he carried a raw and hungry and far too real fear in every fiber of his muscles. Ethan lets himself be held like it’s something he’d considered—wanted—countless times and shut down. 

“I think I could fall in love with you, too,” Ethan mumbles somewhere in the vicinity of Dylan’s collarbone. 

“Believe it or not,” Dylan says into his hair, “I’d actually figured that one out.”

“...So now he’s a mortal,” Dylan concludes. It’s early Saturday morning, and the campus is calm and practically silent aside from the occasional rustling of wind outside his window. The unpredictable time difference between dimensions is still the bane of his existence (and one of the ideas he’s already tossing around for a potential research project), making calls to Mom very hit-or-miss, but he appears to have caught her at a normal waking hour for once. Early evening, maybe, based on the beams of light across her bedroom walls behind her. 

“And here I was expecting you to tell me he’s your boyfriend,” Mom says, blinking in shock, and Dylan rubs the back of his neck.

“Well, that too,” he admits, and Mom—she absolutely  _ beams, _ like, Dylan hasn’t seen her this visibly happy since… maybe ever, and certainly not since Dad died. 

“I knew there was something I liked about that kid,” she jokes, and that’s surprising, too. It’s not that Mom is a miserable person—at least, he hopes not—but she’s like him. Generally tense, and not prone to outward displays of positive emotion. They both hold their happiness close to their chest, like maybe if the universe notices it, it’ll get taken away.

“Do you want to ask if he wants to come here with you for fall break?” she asks. “I mean, I know it’s only two weeks from now, so it’s okay if that’s too last-minute or moving too fast for you or something, I just…” She shrugs. “We have the space. Heck, we even have his old room if he wants it. I know it’s only a week, but it’s a big castle to be stuck in all alone.”

Dylan looks at his mom and feels his surprise fade as he sees the woman who invited ten high schoolers from the hometown she’d been hurt enough by and isolated enough from to cut off without a backwards glance to live in her own home because her daughter had big dreams about peace. The woman who’d grit her teeth and endured her mother’s chaos and pointed remarks in her carefully built new life so her kids would have their grandma in their lives—and then opened her doors to Grandma Aggie permanently, too, because her kids asked. Who, after not having so much as magicked a stain out of her favorite shirt for a decade and a half, trained her daughter to be a witch because she knew when to cut her losses and take a bonding opportunity when it was available to her. Who had the guts to look down at her hands in the ruins of a haunted house and say, “Mother, we need to go to counseling,” and follow through on it, then keep going by herself after a few months, in which she also made the decision to allow her thirteen-year-old to learn magic via extended travel through time and space at the same time that her other two kids left for college in a different dimension. 

He knows his mom isn’t a perfect person, but she sure knows a lot about forgiveness, about picking up the pieces you’ve got left and assembling them into a life. About learning how to breathe around the glue holding your lungs together, how to be held despite the parts that stay sharp no matter how much you’ve hoped that love would sand them down.

“Okay,” Dylan says, “I’ll ask,” and then, because it feels important, “He said he was thinking about you. When he made the decision to renounce his powers.”

Gwen Piper, the strongest person Dylan knows, puts a hand over her mouth and sobs.

“It meant a lot to her,” Dylan says. “Oh, and she asked if you wanted to come home with me for fall break. So I’d say she reacted well.”

Ethan’s eyebrows shoot up. “I—I mean, do you think that’s a good idea? The other study abroad students will be there, right?”

“Not the whole time, for some of them, but yeah. No pressure, and you can think about it first if you want, but Mom didn’t seem to think it’d be a problem.”

“Yeah, I’ll think about it,” Ethan says, worrying his bottom lip with his teeth. “Thank you. All of that really means a lot to me.”

Dylan nods, and is about to try to say something comforting when Elissa floats up next to him and immediately elbows him in the side. 

“And you didn’t bother to call me?!” she asks, and Dylan blinks at her.

“Uh, what?”

She rolls her eyes and looks between him and Ethan meaningfully. Dylan is about to panic—they haven’t really talked about this since last night, he’s not sure if they’re, like,  _ telling _ people yet, or ever—but then Ethan just laughs. 

“Are we really that obvious?”

“Absolutely,” Elissa says, nodding hard enough that her braid bounces against her shoulder. “It’d be disgusting, frankly, but I’m aware I have no ground to float on in that department.”

“Wait, you guys made it official?” Dylan asks, whirling to face her. “And  _ you  _ didn’t call  _ me,  _ you hypocrite?”

Elissa sniffs primly. “I’m telling you now.” She only keeps the act up for a second, though, before grinning. “It was super cute, honestly, they took me to breakfast this morning and everything. Bryss used a spell to change my waffles into a heart and a question mark, because xe’s a fucking dork.”

Ethan raises his eyebrows. “I didn’t get waffles out of this deal. Maybe I should’ve demanded better terms.”

Dylan rolls his eyes. “As if you get up early enough for breakfast on the weekends.” 

“I take it back, you two are gross,” Elissa says, shaking her head. “I’m so fucking happy for you.” 

Dylan and Ethan blush in sync, and she grabs another napkin so she can throw one at each of them at the same time. 

“Hey, guys,” Marnie says, setting her food down beside them and yawning, even though it’s almost two o’clock. “What’s up?”

“You have about three seconds to tell her before I do,” Elissa announces, “I’m not forfeiting my right to make fun of you just because she woke up in time for lunch.” 

Ethan raises an eyebrow at Dylan, who shrugs, so he says, “I’m not sure how much of a shovel talk I’ll be receiving from your mother, but here’s your opportunity to get a head start.” 

Marnie pauses for a moment, processing his statement, and then drops her fork and spins to gape at Dylan. “Oh my god!” 

“...Yes?” he asks.

“Holy shit!” she continues, and he sighs.

“Is it that surprising?”

“Yes,” she says, mock-seriously, and he throws Elissa’s napkin projectile at her. “Okay, you know the drill, hurt my brother and no one will ever find the body, and I mean that very literally because one of my exes is still trapped in the overwhelming nothingness between dimensions. Now that that’s done: holy shit! You guys, I’m so happy for you, oh my god. He pined when you left, you know,” she tells Ethan, mouth half-full from the bite of pasta she just put in it, and Dylan puts his forehead on the table.

“That’s it, I’m transferring,” he says, and Elissa pats him on the back.

“No, you aren’t,” she says.

“No,” he admits, “I’m not.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much to everyone who’s been reading & commenting on this fic! only a short epilogue left :)

“Do you have any Halloween traditions from the mortal world?” Ethan asks, whipped cream from his hot chocolate making a mustache on his upper lip. They’re spread out on a blanket under a tree on the quad, orange leaves drifting down around them every so often. Dylan thought the always-autumn thing would’ve gotten old pretty fast, but so far, he still thinks it’s gorgeous. 

It was always his favorite season as a kid, not that he ever would’ve let on as much to Marnie. 

“Nah,” he says, taking a sip of his own drink, “we were never allowed to celebrate when I was growing up. Mom was worried about… I don’t know what, exactly,” he admits, squinting into the distance. “Being found, I guess, looking back. Or maybe it was just too painful for her in general, especially after Dad died. At the time, I thought it was about, like, cavities and stuff, or fostering unrealistic expectations. But if she wanted us to grow up normal, just going trick-or-treating would’ve been less noticeable than her and Marnie’s annual screaming match, so it was probably something deeper than that.”

“That sucks,” Ethan says, looking genuinely pained, and Dylan has to remind himself that for Ethan, Halloween is literally a way of life. It’d be like if he’d grown up banned from the library. 

“It wasn’t a big deal,” Dylan explains. “Well, for me, at least—Marnie was a mess, but I didn’t really care about all that stuff.” 

“What about now?” Ethan asks, shifting to lean back on one elbow and look at him. There’s a leaf in his hair. It’s annoyingly endearing.

“I don’t know,” Dylan admits. “It still isn’t home, you know, not like it is for Marnie, or even Sophie, but…” He shrugs, looks away. “It’s growing on me.”

“Yeah?” Ethan asks, leaning over to elbow him. Dylan rolls his eyes, curling protectively around his half-full mug.

“Don’t tell my twelve-year-old self. He’d probably faint, and middle school was embarrassing enough without that.” Plus, at that point he hadn’t gone to therapy since six months after Dad died, and he was carrying around twice his weight in internalized homophobia, so. A recipe for disaster all around.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Ethan drawls, flopping back onto the blanket and closing his eyes, a smile dancing across his lips. 

“You’re so dramatic,” Dylan says, settling down far more carefully beside him and entwining their fingers. It’s been six breathless days, and he still can’t believe he’s allowed to do this. 

Ethan hums contentedly, which drifts into a tune Dylan half-remembers from when Grandma Aggie would visit when he was little and tuck him in at night, secretly delighted even though he always pretended to already be asleep. 

_ Met my love in the pumpkin patch _

_ Sunset’s end full two hours past _

_ Said come with me darling, come run fast _

_ Hey lai lai lai hey lo _

_ Met my love by the old broomshed  _

_ Feet off the ground, dream in the head _

_ Said love me now, love me ‘til the end _

_ Hey lai lai lai hey lo _

“Met my love in the old graveyard,” Ethan starts to sing, quiet and melancholy and slower than the verses he’s been humming. “Said we’d rather die than be torn apart. Portal is bright, then the portal is dark. Hey, lai lai lai, hey lo.”

They sit in silence for a moment.

“My grandma never sang that verse,” Dylan says. “I guess it makes sense why.”

Ethan nods. “I’d be surprised if we didn’t discuss it in Professor Nimane’s class by the end of the semester. Like she said, giving up immortality for love is the backbone of legend; it’s just rare to have any proof that someone actually did it.”

By ‘rare’ he means it’s only happened once, which is how Dylan ended up reading about his own mother in his college course. “My mom met my dad and decided that night to leave her whole world for him,” he says, picking at the dead grass beside him. “She said—she said it was better than magic. He made her feel normal.”

He can count on one hand the number of times Mom has talked about meeting Dad since his death. This one, bizarrely enough, was at a therapy session, one of the handful of family ones they’ve had over the last year. Grandma Aggie’s eyes had welled up and she’d clasped Mom’s hand and said, “I understand, dear,” and the therapist had looked vaguely confused but made a valiant recovery by pointing out the common ground in Mom and Grandma Aggie’s experiences as women who have both lost their husbands. She’d probably convinced herself the magic thing was a metaphor. 

“I didn't just fall in love with your father,” he remembers Mom saying once, back when Dad was alive and they told a magicless version of their first meeting regularly. It used to be Sophie’s favorite bedtime story.  _ Once upon a time, on Halloween night…  _ “I fell in love with his world, too.”

He hadn’t known what that’d meant at the time—his world? like, the library?—but he gets it now. In the same way Marnie loves being a witch and a Cromwell, Gwen wanted to be a Piper and a human. 

Dylan isn’t really sure what he wants.

“I don’t really know anything about my mom,” Ethan tells him. “And my dad’s a piece of shit, so.”

“Yeah, no kidding.” He remembers, unbidden, a moment from within the panic after the incident at the mall last year, Ethan saying he wanted to go home but his dad wouldn’t let him. It takes on a new meaning, although it’s no less horrifying, now that he knows Ethan planted the sword himself, that what he was trying to get away from was his father’s own scheme, not potential angry humans. 

He gives Ethan’s hand a squeeze, and Ethan squeezes back. 

“To Ms. Ganieda’s credit, if she holds a grudge, she doesn’t show it,” Ethan says, smiling wryly. Dylan’s relieved to hear him mention the university counselor; he knows Ethan was concerned about seeing her when he found out she was Cassie’s aunt, but it’s not like there are an abundance of therapists in Halloweentown, which Dylan thinks is to everyone’s detriment. 

“That’s good,” Dylan says, and then, for what has to be the dozenth time in the past four days, “Hey, you’re sure you want to come with me for break, right? You know you can back out anytime, I won’t hold it against you. And Marnie and Sophie not being there just means Mom will want to spend that much more time with us—”

“I’m sure,” Ethan interrupts, rolling his eyes, but he’s laughing. “And you know I like your mom, come on.”

“That’s maybe what I’m afraid of,” Dylan grumbles, but he nods, and Ethan readjusts to lay his head on his shoulder, humming again.

_ Met my love in the pumpkin patch…  _

This is the first school dance Dylan’s ever heard of that isn’t hosted in a gym. The ballroom is gorgeous, gleaming in a way it wasn’t even for convocation. A sparkling chandelier dangles from the ceiling, and around the edges of the room, faculty serve cider from a crystal punch bowl in glittering goblets. Even Dylan stops short in the doorway, entranced by the rich floor-to-ceiling tapestries depicting key moments in university history—the founding, the fifth centennial, and surprisingly, one with students of various species in their formal robes, filing through this very door for convocation—the candles in the chandelier and elaborate sconces along the walls, the honest-to-god orchestra, and everyone’s stunning clothing. He’s glad Mom made him get a new outfit, no matter how arduous the process of obtaining it was. 

“I heard the tradition of the Halloween Ball was created to keep university students from making mischief in the mortal world,” Ethan says, materializing at his elbow. “If you’re dancing from dusk to midnight, you can’t go through the portal.”

“Fair point,” Dylan says, before his breath catches in his throat when he turns to look at him more fully. Ethan’s blazer and slacks are bright red, his shirt and bowtie are a matching aqua, and his belt and shoes are, for some unknown reason, light brown. Elissa would have some choice words, and probably will later tonight.

Dylan thinks he looks gorgeous. Actually, Dylan’s thoughts are something like,  _ Fuck, I really do think I could fall in love with him.  _ It’s a heady thought, but it’s warm, like slipping beneath the comforter on a cool autumn night. Better than magic. 

Ethan gives a nervous smile, just the corner of his mouth. “You look really nice.”

“You do, too,” Dylan says, and Ethan must be able to tell he means it, because he beams. 

Ethan takes his hand and pulls him into the room. “I’m not cut out for dancing until midnight,” Dylan warns, and Ethan just laughs and settles their hands into the right position. Dylan worried he’d make a fool of himself not knowing any of Halloweentown’s formal dances, but after Aneesa spent an afternoon taking turns showing him and Marnie the ropes, he thinks he’s got the hang of them. Dancing is pretty mathematical at its core, really, all patterns and ratios, and Aneesa had even called him a natural. 

“Show-off,” Marnie had said, and he’d just mouthed over Aneesa’s shoulder,  _ Ask her.  _ He still doesn’t know if she did or not. 

Ethan is talented on the dance floor, all his nerves and earnest awkwardness settling into a comfortable grace, similar to what Dylan imagines he’ll be like onstage. He’s been following these steps practically since he could walk, what with his father being a pillar of what qualifies as high society in Halloweentown, and the familiarity shows. They whirl across the room, occasionally switching partners with Marnie and Aneesa, and when Dylan calls for a break, Ethan brings him cider and tells him all the best spells for sore feet. 

He waves to Elissa as she, Bryss, and Hudson weave around each other in fast, elaborate designs, switching whose hand is holding whose almost too fast to follow as they spin each other around in progressively more complicated patterns. 

“Is that traditional, too?” Dylan asks, tilting his head in their direction, and Ethan nods. 

“That’s actually one of the best executions of it I’ve ever seen,” he says after taking a sip of his cider. “It’s called  _ riġnaþ, _ it means something like ‘they fall like leaves.’ It dates back to the time of old, old magic, back when people still used wands, and it used to be a pre-marriage ritual. There are different variations for different numbers of people, but it’s something exclusively for relationships between more than two people. It was thought that, like, the better you all danced together, the more compatible you were.” 

He takes another sip of his drink. “There’s a legend behind it, where a dryad, a nymph, and a warlock fell in love, but the day of their wedding, the warlock suddenly collapsed and died. The dryad grieved so deeply that the whole forest grieved with her, and all of their leaves fell to the ground, making the world look like winter for the first time ever in Halloweentown. And the nymph grieved so deeply that the whole river grieved with him, and the churning of the water stirred up a wind so strong that it swept the leaves up into its mist, and out of the twisting chaos emerged their lover, and they were married atop the leaves on the forest floor.”

“Damn,” says Dylan. It resonates, though; the power of it fits with what he’s witnessing. 

“Yeah,” Ethan agrees. “I was really into legends and stuff when I was little. I had a book, like, this thick.” He gestures to indicate something only slightly smaller than Dylan’s favorite space encyclopedia as a kid. “There used to be different ritual dances for all sorts of other ceremonies, too—marriages between two people, commitment ceremonies for nonromantic relationships, adopting a child—but most of them are only practiced really rarely now, if they aren’t entirely obsolete. The  _ riġnaþ, _ though, those have stuck around, I think in part because so many traditional dances are designed around pairs. So it’s like, ‘fuck you, we’ll be over here doing our own thing, creating a space for ourselves and showing all of you up while we’re at it.’”

“That’s… really badass,” Dylan says, and Ethan nods. It makes even more sense why Elissa is so good at this, landing her hoverchair to tilt one side off the ground, pivot on the remaining end, and launch it back into the air practically faster than he can blink. The whole thing has the weight of something ancient, and he thinks he would’ve known these movements predated the castle itself even if Ethan hadn’t told him. 

“Do you know any of the other ones? The ones for two people, I mean?” Dylan asks on impulse, and immediately panics because, like, it’s not like he wants to make himself look ridiculous trying to dance something brand-new to him and complicated and meaningful in front of the entire student body, and even though they’re dating now, asking is probably super weird in and of itself—

“I do, yeah,” Ethan says before Dylan can take it back. “I, uh, like I said, I spent a lot of time reading about this stuff. And practicing some of them, to be honest. My dad thought it was a waste of time.”

“I think it’s really cool,” Dylan says, and he does; he’s never really been a mythology person, and he’d probably nod along but not get all that invested if it was Marnie telling him, but he likes seeing Ethan so excited about something, in the way he only ever was about rehearsal in high school, or the way he gets when explaining a particularly complicated potion now.

“Do you, uh, want to—” Ethan asks, and Dylan nods.

“Yeah, why not,” he says, and Ethan’s expression is nothing short of awed.

“Okay,” Ethan says once they’ve settled into place a couple of yards away from Elissa and her dates, Ethan’s left hand on Dylan’s waist and his right arm out, bent at the elbow, “this is called  _ anginn.  _ It was performed as a blessing for new beginnings. The name can also mean sunrise, which I always liked.” 

He talks Dylan through the basic set of steps, explaining that they basically spiral outward from there, keeping the same core routine but with broader gestures and bolder movements during each repetition. Then they dance, starting almost entirely pressed together chest-to-chest, feet only avoiding tangling because they step completely in time with each other, the inside of Ethan’s shoe aligned perfectly against the outside of Dylan’s. There’s no space for Dylan’s nerves among the dizzying revolutions, so he sets them aside to hold closer to himself later and leans into the part of him that trusts Ethan’s lead and his own ability to follow it, which is the same part of him that sings with recognition at each movement. This, he’s pretty sure, is why Marnie feels at home in Halloweentown in a way he never will; unscientific though it may be, her very being knows it belongs here on a cellular level in a way Dylan will only ever get glimpses of. 

He’s more than content with that, because frankly, it’s fucking terrifying, but when Ethan backs up a few inches to start the second repetition of the steps and Dylan gets a glimpse of his face, it’s worth it. He looks like someone who’s just had a childhood dream come true—which, Dylan supposes, he himself is, too, because here he is, dancing with a boy. 

They dance until their right arms are fully extended, connected only by the barest brush of fingertips, each step wide and sure and accompanied by a complex gesture of their right hands that Dylan performs more on instinct than anything else, like mental math that he can’t recall now how he learned or remember ever not knowing the order of. Then Ethan is clasping his hand tight, drawing him to his chest and spinning them in a last tight circle before they stop, breathing hard. Ethan’s hair is falling across his forehead, sweat having rendered his hair gel useless. Dylan wants to kiss him more than anything in the world.

“Incredible dancing, incredibly awful outfit,” Elissa says from somewhere off to their side, and they break apart. “So really, it cancels out to a resounding neutral.” Ethan laughs, and she hugs him. “Seriously, though, you killed it. The only people I've ever seen dance  _ anginn _ are my moms, and they’d kick your ass at it, but they’d also say how great it is to see someone who loves it that much, so. Thanks for reminding me of home.”

“Shit, thank you so much,” Ethan says, brushing his hair off of his forehead and only succeeding in making it form an awkward curve instead. “You—you all looked amazing, I mean, I’ve never seen a  _ riġnaþ  _ that natural in my life—”

“That’s fortuitous, huh?” Hudson says, walking up to them with a chalice of cider in one hand and Bryss’s hand in the other. Elissa rolls her eyes and elbows him. 

“Don’t get any ideas. My moms will absolutely be able to tell.”

“Oh, so we’re meeting your moms?” Hudson asks, grinning, and Elissa groans. 

“You all look really nice,” Dylan says after a second of silence, and the three of them beam. They’ve obviously put a lot of effort into their outfits; the bowtie Hudson has paired with his white suit matches the dark blue of Elissa’s suit perfectly, as do Bryss’s skirt, suspenders, and tie. Hudson’s dangling star earrings are the same pale silver as Elissa’s skin and Bryss’s nose ring, and his locs are held in a loose ponytail by a chain of the same white flowers that Bryss has braided into xyr hair. 

“Yeah, you definitely have my vote for best dressed,” Ethan agrees, and Elissa jokes that he has her vote for worst, and then a hush falls across the room. 

It must be later than Dylan thought, because the moon is directly overhead now, its light drifting through the skylight and magnified as it reflects off the crystals of the chandelier. One by one, the candles in the room go out, and the orchestra begins the rich notes of a slow song. 

“May I have this dance?” Ethan asks, holding his hand out, and Dylan takes it. Out the corner of his eye, he catches Aneesa taking Marnie’s hand at the same moment and smiles to himself, then lets himself get swept away in the soft light and Ethan’s soft hand in his and on his shoulder, the feeling of Ethan’s hair brushing his neck and Ethan’s hip beneath his palm, the ethereal moment extending as they sway together until the last note echoes through the room and it’s quiet, the moon shifts out of perfect alignment, and the candles relight themselves. 

Ethan yawns. 

“Bedtime,” he says, and squeezes Dylan’s hand before disentangling himself. “I’ll see you when Benny picks us up at noon tomorrow, yeah?” 

“Yeah,” Dylan agrees, and makes his way among the crowd of other students heading to their rooms, warm all the way to his core.

Mom opens the door with characteristic dramatics, immediately enveloping Dylan in a hug. He doesn’t resist. God, he’s missed her. 

She gives Ethan a hug, too, although more briefly, and he looks caught off guard, but not in a bad way. “I hate not knowing what time you’ll be here,” she says as they follow her into the house and to the kitchen. “Dylan, I really don’t see why your physics professor can’t figure out an equation to convert time between dimensions if he can teach freshmen a class on the mechanics of time travel.”

Dylan shrugs. “Professor Chandrasekhar is a busy man. Plus, I’m the only freshman in that class.”

“That’s right, because you’re brilliant,” she says, patting his cheek. He lets her, even though his new boyfriend is  _ right there, _ because he isn’t Marnie, and because he missed her a  _ lot. _

“Did you eat before you left?” she asks, and they both shake their heads. “Great, because it’s almost dinnertime here, and while from what I can gather, it seems Witch U is a cut above most mortal college cafeterias, nothing beats a home-cooked meal.” 

“Lasagna?” Dylan guesses, and she nods. 

“Three trays, because I somehow ended up with eight teenagers under my roof,” she says. “Speaking of which, don’t eat the vegetarian one unless you’ve made some lifestyle changes I don’t know about since going to college, because Natalie, Vic, and Fern will definitely go through the whole thing themselves, and they can’t eat the ones with meat. Ethan, sweetie, your room from last year is ready because Dylan didn’t tell me any differently, but there are a couple others free if you’d rather be somewhere else. Dylan, you can just move the clean sheets and towels to any other empty room if he wants. Food should be ready by the time you boys have put your things away and washed up.” 

Ethan says he’s fine in his old room, really, so Dylan leaves him to it and spends the next ten minutes lying on his bed, blasting his favorite CD, and recharging all of his devices at once. God, it’s good to be home. He washes his hands and heads downstairs, where he’s startled to see Natalie, Cassie, and Ethan already sitting at the table, neither on opposite sides nor in awkward silence. 

“Dylan!” Natalie exclaims, jumping up to hug him. “I  _ almost  _ regretted not going to Witch U the first few weeks of classes. It took me ages to find another study partner who could keep up.” 

“I’m flattered,” Dylan says, grinning and sitting in the empty chair beside Ethan. 

He gives him a questioning look at the general lack of hostility, and Ethan whispers back, “I sent letters.” Huh. It definitely won’t fix everything, but that was a really smart idea.

“Okay, kids,” Mom says after a variety of monsters have filed in from the hall and taken their seats. She waves a hand. “Or, you know, young adults, whatever. Dig in.” The trays of pasta and plates of garlic bread are passed around, and to Dylan’s immense mortification, he briefly has to blink back tears. It smells like his childhood, is all, it’s been his favorite meal for as long as he can remember, and Mom seems so happy, despite everything, dipping her bread in her sauce like always and rolling her eyes at something the pixie beside her said and reminding Chester to keep his elbows off the table. 

“No magic at the dinner table,” she reminds Cassie, who sheepishly lets go of Natalie’s hand to grab her fork from midair, but there’s no malice or fear in it. 

“Sorry, Gwen,” Cassie responds, and Dylan tries not to gape.

“You’re sure you’re not having a midlife crisis?” he asks Mom, and she rolls her eyes. 

“If I did, it would’ve been five years ago when my children followed my mother into an alternate dimension and wound up battling the forces of darkness,” she says, raising her eyebrows. “Running a hostel for a bunch of college students is nothing.” 

“Fair enough,” he admits, and shuts up and eats his lasagna.

“It’s Fern and Chester’s night for dishes,” Mom reminds everyone after they’ve eaten dinner and made quick work of a massive pile of chocolate chip cookies. “Dylan and Ethan are added into the rotation starting tomorrow. If you need a ride next week, make sure it’s on the whiteboard before you go to bed tonight—oh, and please call your families, okay, my headphone number is for emergencies only. Speaking of which,” she adds as it starts to ring, and carries the hot pink skull into the next room.

Dylan is very carefully not sitting too close to Ethan on the couch when she gets back. “Marnie and Aneesa made it to her parents’ safely,” she says, and Dylan nods. “There’s, uh, a lounge or whatever on the students’ hall, if you boys are interested, but everyone who’s in there right now is probably doing homework.” 

“That’s fine,” Dylan says, “I wanted to spend time with you, remember?” and she smiles, soft and pleased. 

She asks about the ball, and both of their classes, and then Dylan tells her about how Professor Nimane approached him about a research opportunity—“Totally unexpected, because I’m not majoring in her field, but theory of immortality is fundamentally linked to theory of magic, so I’m considering it”—and how much he hates hand-washing his clothes. 

“It builds character,” she says, laughing, before admitting that she definitely washed everything by magic when she was in school. 

“There’s a laundromat in town, but I’m not about to bring my dirty laundry on the carriage,” Dylan says, “and you know I hate taking a broom.” 

“Technically, you don’t even have your license,” Ethan adds helpfully, and Dylan groans. “You’re right, though, they’re definitely going to have to add an on-campus option for students who aren’t magic users.” 

Eventually, Mom goes to bed, and Dylan and Ethan, still wide awake due to the significant time change, watch nature documentaries until the early hours of the morning. “This is nice,” Ethan mumbles into his shoulder between narration about the feeding habits of antarctic penguins, and Dylan nods. _Yeah,_ he thinks, _it really is._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the dance names are in Old English! also, i definitely want to write more for these two, so while i have a few ideas brewing, feel free to send me prompts in the comments or on tumblr @campgender !


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much to everyone who’s been reading along with this story! this was very much a passion project (as in, “i do not choose the hyperfixation, the hyperfixation chose me”) and it means the world to me that folks have found it meaningful and comforting <3 much love to you all and happy (slightly belated) halloween

_ Three and a half years later _

Professor Nimane looks up upon Dylan’s light knock on the frame of her open door and smiles when she sees him. “I hope you aren’t expecting me to have edited that article by now,” she says. “I told you, don’t expect a word until at least a week after graduation.”

“Understood,” Dylan says, taking that for the invitation it is and closing the door behind him before sitting down in the plush green chair across from her desk. “Speaking of graduation, that’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about.” 

She raises an eyebrow, something he still can’t do after years of dating Ethan, and he sets his hands on his knees, bracing himself. By virtue of being his research advisor for the last three years and an incredibly warm person, she knows more about his personal life than anyone on campus aside from Ethan, Marnie, and Elissa, and Ethan had decided to open up to her about his mortality during a particularly rough patch sophomore year when he asked her for some resources, so she has more context than anyone besides Mom for what he’s about to say.

“Ethan insists that I should choose which dimension I want to live in after college because I didn’t get much of a choice in coming here to begin with,” he explains. “But I don’t know where I want that to be. Which, if you’d asked me freshman year, I would’ve thought was absurd—like, the mortal world is my home, I belong there—but I’ve lived here for the majority of the last four years, I don’t have the foundation of a mortal undergraduate education, and Ethan is from here… I thought it’d become obvious to me closer to the time to make a decision, but I still don’t know what to do.”

Professor Nimane nods slowly. “Do you remember why I chose the course title I did freshman year?” 

Dylan rakes through his memory. “Buried in Brocéliande? It’s the forest where Merlin’s tomb is rumored to be located, right?”

“Precisely,” she says. “Magic users, at least according to my research, unilaterally enter into a state of existence in which they can be killed for one reason, and that’s love. Now, that could be platonic, romantic, familial, love for a species or cause or dimension, but it’s always love. And this isn’t something I could argue in a paper, but I think it’s because love of any kind that crosses the boundary between dimensions taps into the forgotten part in the core of us that knows there once was no boundary. Halloweentown and the mortal world used to be one realm. All of us belong to both worlds, Dylan, some of us just happen to feel that tension more acutely, and you’re one of those people.” She gives a self-deprecating smile. “Which I know doesn’t help you very much, but it’s the truth, or at least my impression of the truth: there is no wrong answer because there’s no right one, either.”

Ethan sleeps over that night, the two of them tucked around each other in Dylan’s narrow bed. “How was Professor Nimane?” Ethan asks, draping his arm over Dylan’s torso. 

“Philosophical,” Dylan says, leaning back into his chest. Ethan hums. “Do you still feel the way you did a few weeks ago when we talked about this? That there are things you’d actually prefer about the human world?” 

“Yeah,” Ethan says quietly after a few moments. “It feels selfish, but it’d be nice to live somewhere where no one knows who my father is or what he did.”

“I don’t think that’s selfish,” Dylan says honestly. “It’s basically why my mom left.”

“Who knew being a celebrity and a pariah would have their similarities,” Ethan says, and Dylan can feel him smirking against the back of his neck. Ethan turns the smirk into a kiss, and Dylan smiles. “So does that mean you want to try our luck in the mortal world?”

“Yeah,” Dylan says, fumbling to find Ethan’s arm in order to squeeze his hand. Ethan squeezes back. What a pair they make, the warlock who renounced his magic and the one who never wanted it to begin with, folded together in the dark.

Marnie throws her arms around his neck after the graduation ceremony, and he hugs her tight and spins her around like they’re little kids again. Now she really can fly, and Chancellor Goodwin is rushing to falsify his diploma so he has a shot at getting a job or into grad school, and they both made it through the biggest sacrifice he’s ever made for anybody relatively intact. 

“Thank you,” she says, her face still tucked close to his neck. She pulls back and looks at him, reaching up to set her hands on his shoulders. “Seriously, I never thanked you, and I should have. Every life-changing experience I’ve had here is because of you.” She looks like she’s starting to tear up, which honestly makes him kind of uncomfortable, but instead of making a jab, he hugs her again.

“Apology accepted,” he says, and she laughs. “Now go find your girlfriend.” 

Marnie swats him on the shoulder but goes to do just that, and Dylan gets swept up in a rush of congratulations and goodbyes and, in Elissa’s case, demands to attend her and her partners’ graduation party, which he responds to with his own demand that she visit him and Ethan in the mortal world.

“So you’ve decided?” she asks, and when he nods, she hugs him again.

“For now, at least. There’s no telling what’ll happen a few years down the line. But you, Bryss, and Hudson are always welcome, no matter where we are.”

“Same to you,” she says, and she’s beaming when she adds, “I’m so happy for you both. Let me know when you two get a place, I’ll send a housewarming gift,” she adds with a devious grin.

“Package from Elissa,” Dylan says when he gets back from the P.O. box. Ethan looks up from the large box he’s currently elbow-deep into unpacking.

“Already? That was fast.” 

“She has her ways, and I do not ask,” Dylan says, and spends half an hour rooting through boxes labeled DESK STUFF to locate a pair of scissors. “A Goldilocks blessing for your new home,” he reads. “May your furniture be the right size, your food be the right temperature, and your mattress be the right firmness. Love to your apartment from ours, Elissa + Bryss + Hudson.”

He laughs when he sees the contents of the package. It’s a drawstring bag labeled EMERGENCY MOVING KIT in Elissa’s slanted handwriting and contains silverware, toilet paper, toothpaste and toothbrushes, and a gift certificate for a local Chinese place. “She has powers beyond my comprehension,” he says, and tosses Ethan the menu. 

That evening, they curl up on their thrift-store couch, empty takeout cartons piled in the cardboard box they’re currently using as a trash can. Dylan rests his head on Ethan’s shoulder. “So,” he asks, “ready for a fresh start?”

Ethan’s starting a doctorate in plant medicine next month, and though Dylan’s still keeping his options open for more traditional human career paths, for now he’ll be working on improving cross-dimension communication techniques. His first goal is the development of something like a witch’s glass that can be used by all species so the Halloweentown residents studying in this dimension can see their families and friends more often. Mom is thrilled at the prospect of her headphone no longer ringing constantly.

“Nah,” Ethan says, kissing his forehead, “I’m ready for a happy middle.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you’re interested for more on these two for me, check out my newest WIP, “better find another superstition,” which is a very different (ie much more canon compliant) take on return to halloweentown 
> 
> and feel free to send me prompts here or on tumblr if there are scenes from this universe or other ethan/dylan ideas you’d like to see!

**Author's Note:**

> i’m on tumblr @campgender if you want to say hi or talk about Halloweentown!!


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